How does this function?

nyffix

So as per suggested in a previous thread I found and looked at this overwatch character. The place I got it from said it was an original from the game but when I looked at the model I noticed that it's broken up into pieces. So things that would make sense to be disconnected, are disconnected such as sachelm helmet, armor bits etc... but then the actual body is broken up by materials (i imagine it is that way anyway)

How does this stay together when it's rigged/ in an engine/ used by players?

I've attached a picture of it! This is after I've moved some pieces around.

neilberard

I don't know how their pipeline works, but it could be that the border verts are welded during export. I assume it's chopped up to allow for more efficiently packed uv maps.

Eric Chadwick

It's likely the ripper is extracting models directly from the GPU, in which case you're seeing the model in it's compressed and optimized form, not the original version the artists worked with.

Neox

Eric is correct. What you see is the skin material and the body material. They are on the same texture sheet but skin and body are usually actually welded but with an hard edge between the two material groups.
The head is actually split from the body tho, the faces almost never get touhed, so the rigging and skinning stays intact.

Interesting that it looks welded here

nyffix

Thank you for clearing that up! I was confused. I guess the most I can use it is to look at the UVs? The topology is kind of hard to make out considering it's triangles. I'll roam the internet some more and hopefully I can find something better to look at!

Neox

Everything is triangles in the end. Take a good look at it, try to blend out the diagonals and you will see that it is mostly a quad based structure