FPS Character + Full-Body-Awareness

goekbenjamin

As someone who has never questioned how this works....
When in Unity (or any other engine) a playable character mesh is created, and i as the player "is looking through the eyes of that mesh"
only the hands are visible.
But when i would look at other players (meshes) the whole mesh is visible.
How is that achieved?

I am part of a discord group, and one member will import the character mesh i prepared, to achieve that hide/show partial mesh, he means i should split up the materials into "head/arms/rest", which i never saw that before.

I dont work in the industry, but i have seen alot meshes and its uvs, and i have never saw that a character was splitten into that called groups...

Is that the right way?
i mean, if yes, that the "head material" would contain following uvs
head, hair, eyes, goggles
wouldn't that be strange?

Does somebody have a advice for me?

Thanks alot!

audi100

The easiest solution is that the whole player mesh and the arms are two seperate meshes. For the first person view the player mesh is then not rendered but the hands are. Also the hand mesh then gets only assigned/tagged to be visible only for the player. Some games with full body just have a seperate mesh without the head i reckon.

If the rendering visibility is controlled by the material then splitting them up this way makes sense i guess.

poopipe

You'll usually find there are  separate first and third person models - it's often better from a ux experience if arms are in the wrong place and you can choose to always render them over the top of other objects etc. 

Lots or reasons to do it that way 

goekbenjamin

Thanks alot guys, this will help me alot!!