Character with changeable equipment.

Pioni

Hello. Im very new to 3d modeling and im using Blender. Im modeling characters for a game and i tought i should ask for advice.
So i have done alot of googling and found many threads about this subject but did not find everything answered that i need.

I have modeled male and female playable characters with "starting" equipment/clothes. He and She has rig and some animations.
I plan on modeling clothing sets for the character, not individual parts of clothes but sets. I plan that the player can customize these clothing sets colours.

So how would you do this? Do i need to have the head separated from the body/clothes and switch to new object when other set is equipped? How about the colors? How should i organize UV maps should i have separate UV map for head and every set? And then make color maps for every available color combination? 

Please share with me how you would do this. Thanks!

WiktorWasowski

Not sure about your modeling issue - I don't do character modeling and I don't know techniques commonly used for equipment swapping, but I can tell you how I would approach the color customization. Two solutions come to my mind:

1. On your color texture of the character desaturate areas that are going to be colored by the player. Then create another texture which is going to be a greyscale mask for these areas. Simply paint white where the customizable parts are and black everything else. You can then modify the Unity's Standard Shader (or whichever you use) to additionally use your mask. You could utilize the existing color picker that tints the texture and change it so it only affects areas that are white on your mask. However, this approach requires some basic shader programming knowledge or a visual shader creation tool like Shader Forge or Amplify Shader Editor.

2. Use Substance Designer and make the texture procedural. Expose a color variable that affects desired areas. This gives you way more control over the way that the color chosen by the player affects the texture, but requires a tool that is not free (although it's pretty cheap for how powerful and useful it is - I highly recommend buying it). This is the approach that I would most likely take.

Pioni

Thanks for the reply!
One question i forgot to ask. That is how to apply vertex weights on to the changed object. Does it apply them automatically when parenting to the rig? 

My characters are textured with hand painted style and you can see brush tracks. I dont use any normal maps. If i change only the color will the brush track go away? Could i just make color maps for each color combination that i want to be available for the player?  And maybe transpare parts i dont want to be affected? It would be more work but simpler. Is this a bad idea? 

WiktorWasowski

Doesn't matter if you use normal maps or not. Simply desaturate the customizable areas on the color texture and let them be tinted by a color. The only situation in which this approach won't work is when you use dark tints. A black overlay will indeed erase all lighting detail on your texture. You could partially counter it by incorporating the highlights into the mask I mentioned earlier (making the mask black on highlights) or by using some shader magic to properly apply dark tints, but the easiest and most accurate way would be to use Substance Designer for this. Also, creating different textures for all color combinations sounds inefficient. It's simply a waste of space unless you're going to have more differences than just color. Separating customizable parts would help with that but it still doesn't sound like an elegant solution.

Pioni

Thanks really much. I will start on working this out this helps alot!

Eric Chadwick

This might give you some ideas
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/SkankerzeroModularCharacterSystem

Pioni

Thanks. Dont know how i have not found that yet.