Best approach for rigging a character with armor pieces that can be changed.

Suparmon

I searched for quite a bit but couldn't really find exactly how to do that. I'll be making rigs for a game that has stick-man like characters with different types of chest armor/helmets,etc., that can be swapped. The game is being made in unity.

Anyone who has experience with working on something like this, can you share some methods of how this is done? What I'm currently thinking is attaching all the armor to the rig and hiding it, then afterwards use a script to simply make visible whatever armor piece the player has equipped. Is that a reasonable approach, or is there another more efficient way?

SunCrypt

I'm allso looking around to see what approach would be the best here. I have no problem creating my models but I'm really new to rigging. Hope someone with more experience in this drops a line here

Alex_J

There is an article on this website I used to get started on my own modular characters. Google "modular character system" and look for the polycount thread. It's probably archived in the rigging section of the wiki as well. It goes really in depth. 

For my own system, yes I have all pieces rigged to a single skeleton in a maya scene, and I export them all as a single fbx. Then, a script in Unity procedurally chooses compatible outfits. 

The real crux of the system is organization. You won't get it right the first time if you are figuring it out as you go along. Try to plan so that you don't have to do shit twice, but be mentally prepared to do shit thrice. In retrospect, I think I should have saved rigging until the end. It was necessary to quick rig some things for testing, but I spent a lot of time rigging characters only to need to make major changes down the line, and ended up having to do theh weight painting too many damn times. Really started to burn me out.

Depending on how many possible combinations you might have, keeping everything in a single fbx may be unreasonable. In that case, you'd need a script to stitch the skeletons together, if you export each mesh separate with a skeleton. You can still rig them to the same skeleton in the same scene for ease though.

For rigging humanoid characters, I highly recommend Maya's humanIK. It's easy to use. All you got to do is learn a bit about weight painting and you should be good to go for most stuff.

At some point, I'll do a full write up of how my specific system works, and also all the dumb shit I learned not to do. However, I'm still busy working on it, so that will have to be some months from now.