keeping head seperate from body: charchter
polycounter lvl 12
Some charachter models I see the head detached from the body and then covered by apparrel of sorts. The obvious reason would be that the artist wants a higher resolution than the body, is this true? but is there an advantage in animating this way? the reason im asking is that im doing this for one of my own models.
Replies
Detached heads can be used to allow swapping them for character customization. But you then want to either hide the seam with a shirt collar, or else match the vertex normals. If you don't you'll see a shading seam because the vertex normals don't match.
Detached head makes animation a bit more difficult, but not much. Just need exact same weighting on both sides of the seam, and need to make sure your game exporter doesn't add animation compression noise that would create periodic gaps.
A couple things to think about for production, but not so much for a portfolio piece, if that's where you're headed.