Question on a Character with Armour

Scotty_Did_Does

So I've been working on an FPS for a while and I keep getting stumped on what the best method of optimising my models should be. The characters wear armour over clothing and I've tried doing meshes where the armour and the stuff underneath (clothing, skin, all that good stuff.) are all one mesh but I've found that makes weird deformations in the mesh when I've attempting rigging/animation.

The other method was making each piece of armour a separate mesh and deleting the mesh that wouldn't be seen under the armour but I wonder if that will make exporting and optimisation.

I guess this is more of a "what's you opinion?" post but I'm kinda stumped and need to lockdown a pipeline for making content.

Thanks.

slosh

Games like PUBG probably just have the clothes over the naked body with nothing being turned off.  It's not a pretty way to do it but you can get a lot of customization that way.  I prefer something like Fortnite where the whole character swaps out.  You can get far better silhouette breaking outfits and interesting characters that way.  Personally, I hate having a billion different slots with really meaningless swap outs.  

MattDawe

I think generally the best way to go would be to delete the geometry covered by any clothes or armor - if no one's gonna see those polygons, there's no need for them to be there. If you separate the clothing from the character, it also opens the possibility of customizing and chaning clothing items.

As far as rigging issues go, Maya has a handy Copy Skin Weights tool that really helps with giving a character's body and clothes the exact same skin weights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23jF5Cm2_g4 If you're not using Maya, I'm sure you can find a similar tool in any other modeling software (I hope).

Scotty_Did_Does

slosh said:

Games like PUBG probably just have the clothes over the naked body with nothing being turned off.  It's not a pretty way to do it but you can get a lot of customization that way.  I prefer something like Fortnite where the whole character swaps out.  You can get far better silhouette breaking outfits and interesting characters that way.  Personally, I hate having a billion different slots with really meaningless swap outs.  

There isn't going to be any customisation, its a single player FPS and my main inspirations are stuff like Half-Life 2 and Halo. If there's no customisation should I focus on making these models single mesh so its less complicated?

Skinner3D

I personally would cut out as much body as you can. Keeps it from sticking through at weird times. Also if its an FPS with no camera change, you can get away with a lot of crap. Halflife 2 is a perfect example. You were just hands feet and weapons if I recall right.