Nails as a seperate object?

Weiser_Cain

Not that I've done anything on it yet but I was thinking of making the fingernails on a bunch of characters separate objects so that if say they became 'boogie creatures' I could swap out the nails for a different set that fits their condition or even transforms (which is what I'm looking into). Is this an inherently stupid idea?

MoP

Well, what I'd do is probably model them as part of the hand and use some sort of morphing technique to blend between versions.

It depends on the game engine, I guess. If it supports morphing, go with that... if not, I guess you'd have to do the way you're describing. If it was low-poly, you could just make the nails as alpha planes and just changing the texture instead of the mesh itself.

Mark Dygert

Its the same idea as switching heads out on models. Its not stupid but it depends on what engine you are using if it can be done the way you need it to be. MoP has a good idea about using alpha's that sounds like it is your best bet reguardless of the engine.

Downsizer

Cant you just assign modular decoration objects as non-collision tag based geometry? Like the guns for quake 3, they were essentially seperated geometry attached by a polygonal tag system that just followed the tag durring animations. If the game you are working on uses modular things heavily, this would be excellent for more control. The morphing is nice, but again depends on engine and target GPU/CPU.

man_o_mule

this can be done in code with the unreal engine. that's how they switch the guns. but it would be a little crazy attaching 10 seperate fingernail models to a model.....then switching them out

Rick Stirling

You could treat them as a skinned prop, each aligned to a fingerbone, and swap out the objects. This would allow for animated creature nails, treating each nail as an entity parented to the finger.

The simplest method I would say is to build both onto the model, set them as different materials and then display one or the other(adn having a state that altered collision if needed).

Downsizer

Not 10 seperate objects for each nail. one set for each hand, I dont see why each nail would have to be animated or moved seperately if the animations are lined up with the hand. so it would be 2 sockets/tagged geometries.

The other issue, is the engine would have to support vertex animation, or maybe i'm just not understanding the bones concept well enough to see the fingernails as neededing them.

This thread is good advice for any kind of attached/changeable animated objects really..