I eventually want to have characters in my game which will be able to swap out pieces of clothing/armor etc. I was wondering how I could do this properly. Some would be just like clothing, nothing fancy, but some would be like robes or something and those would kind of have to move when the player moves. Wouldn’t that require my rig to have bones for a robe-type movement, which brings me to the next part.
From my experience in the last engine I used, I would have a character be made of several pieces like the torso, head, legs, arms and whatnot… and then replace the torso mesh if I put different armor on, is that the same way to do it here? I just think it would be a bit weird to have extra rigging bones, for the robe movement animation, on a character if it doesn’t have a robe on. Not sure if that is explained properly…
Also, I was wondering about animations. Should I just have 1 rig and have a ton of animations for it, such as… Idle_Sword, Idle_Bow… Attack1_Sword, Attack1_Bow, Walk_Sword, Walk_Bow… and have it call the animations based on the weapon that is equipped? That way I could re-use the rig for all the character classes. All characters will be able to use all weapon/armor types, so I didn’t think I should make a new rig for each character class, because they can all hypothetically look the same anyway. Some engines work differently and I’m just trying to learn what is the right way to do this.
I use Blender for modeling/rigging/animating and I use whatever the free Unity is. Thanks in advance for any help on this topic.
Edit: The last engine I used had a terrible time with cloth/physics type stuff, so my mindset might be off, as Unity seems to handle it nicely. Can cloth materials be done without bones/rigging, so a robe type clothing wouldn’t need bones to animate the movement?.. or can only the Pro version of Unity do cloth?
You seem to be thinking along the right lines. There is a character customisation example on the Unity website that you might find useful here.
Also, you might be interested to know that interactive cloth will be a feature of Unity 3.0. This will simulate the cloth directly with the physics engine without adding bones or scripting.
With Unity 3 all you need is the robe object you can place on your character and define as cloth and you instantly have a cloth simulated robe. As for character customization, create the body base and then all cloths and armor hats etc make separate objects that you spawn and attach to bones in the person model. You got the right idea. It’s all about creating a base and then all the extras are separate objects you attach to the base.
When you say make a base, do you mean like have a body model and then place objects over it?.. or do you mean have a model made in pieces and replace the pieces with other ones to change appearance. I’m trying to make a game that will have plenty of things going on, so simple is better. Having overlapping objects covering the body mesh seems harder and would probably be more system resource used up.
I was thinking like… to change a piece like gloves, I would replace the hand mesh with the glove I want, not just adding a glove over the hand. I hope I make sense, I just want to know which would work best. I’m not trying to get awesome realistic detail in my game, just “good enough” to fit the style I want.
As far as robes go, I suppose that would be placed over/around/attached to the mesh, but for skin tight things or solid armor pieces, I get the feeling it would be better to just replace that segment of the character. I’ve seen that character customization thing, it is interesting to say the least. I just have so much to do and I want to be sure I’m working on learning the right process before I go off and learn a bunch of stuff that won’t help me in the end.
Thanks for the replies so far, I was getting a bit worried when I didn’t get any for a while.
