Question about clothes and hiding/deleting geometry underneath for game purposes
polycounter lvl 9
As far as I researched I saw that in cases where the character won't change clothes you'd delete the hidden parts of the body underneath. However, my question is about those case scenarios where you'd change the character, like in MMOs Guild Wars 2 etc.
For example, when your character is fully clothed in a game like GW2 or WoW, is his body geometry underneath temporarily hidden/deleted and only gets activated once you remove them?
In other words, does a fully clothed character in the example of an MMO render all geometry including what's underneath and animates everything simultaneously?
Replies
I can't remember which game for sure, but there was recently an image shared from God of War or Horizon Zero Dawn where the characters forearm is essentially just scaled inwards to avoid clipping with forearm wraps. Probably varies a lot depending on the game, it might not be worth it in modern games to create and manage a bunch of different versions of a character with different parts hidden/deleted. But if heavy optimization is needed, it probably makes sense.
there is going to be like 50 different considerations that factor into the choice of how to do it. Team will just choose whatever is easiest for the project.
You can setup multiple models for different cases where portions are deleted, or hide faces through a script, or just scale down underneath models like mentioned...
pretty much you either have to make an assembly line for the art content and know what the possible combinations will be, or program some system which can figure it out at runtime to manage what to show/hide.
It's not a problem for a character artist to solve really - nor one where there is any best way. Trying to generalize a solution outside of an project to give context I think won't be very useful.
Here's a detailed guide to one approach: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/SkankerzeroModularCharacterSystem
Usually you'll be deciding between production speed or flexibility down the road. Takes more time to develop something flexible, so personally I try to not get into high commitment system like that until project is pretty mature. Waste too much time developing systems just to throw them away if the game design isn't pretty well locked down.
Thanks guys, that clarifies a lot. Happy holidays! :)