I have searched for help on this everywhere without really finding any useful advice or reference to how it is done in commercial games.
What is the workflow when making characters and armor for MMOs? It must be a common problem because more and more people are looking in the MMO direction.
Mesh modeling (texturing)
Skeleton and bones rigging
Skinning
Animation
Where does 3d stop and scripting follow?
I want to set up a workflow where I can start out simple with an animated character, couple of different clothing, and couple of different character meshes. I then want to experiment swapping clothing (a variety of models and textures) and even swapping character meshes!
Now: I import my semi nude male model from C4d into Blender (Blender is acutally lot faster with skinning and rigging), set up a rig, make a couple of sequences, and I can easily import the blend file directly to Unity to se how it goes (Yei!). One slight problem with this is that the character changes in size everytime I export and import from the apps, and that gets very confusing.
And all of this gets very difficult when skinned meshes are added to the soup. I know that I import the clothing mesh into the same file in Blender as the animated character, weigh the mesh to the same rig, and scroll slowly through the sequences to see if the weighting is proper enough.
And I have about 10 male and 10 female body meshes!
People have even suggested that ALL clothed meshes possible must be loaded for every character and hidden and shown depending on the character! That sound slike a heavy duty character file 
Anyone know the professional way to go, and maybe what must be settled before I move on and what can I change or add later?
Personally, I tend to go with a simple texture and bump map change with the same base model. This’ll work for most character features without any additional modeling required.
As for clothing, I just give the clothing the same rig my characters have and animate it to match the characters’ animation. You can, once again, just change the texture and bump map in order to make the clothing seem completely different. Unless it’s something wildly different like armor types, you can usually get away with one mesh for the clothing and one mesh for the body. When you have a new set of clothing, you switch its material out. When you have a different character, you switch its material out.
Of course, this usually depends on you having an artist good enough to give you quality bump maps.
Edit: For a character’s stored settings, just designate an int for the clothing, character model, and other associated items. The ints are used as positions in the client program’s arrays of materials and meshes.
That sounds pretty straight forward I understand texturing, all I have to learn now is Zbrush 
My characters have different bodies (male/female, muscular/fat etc) If I theoretically have 5 body meshes and one piece of armor mesh, does it mean I have to duplicate that armor mesh five times and fit each to the body meshes and then assign it to the rig? That would mean the rig must already exist within all body meshes in the 3d app… which then means that all body meshes would also be inside the same 3d file… hmm it sounds like I have just figured it out!
This would give the following workflow:
-Create a ‘male’ character and a rig that would be rescaled and used for all characters.
-Create ‘female’ character and get rig from ‘male’.
-Animate strictly female animations on the female rig, and vice versa. Neutral sequences can be added to one of them. (I can always add or refine animations directly in the app for an easy export and updating of the track)
-Additional male and female meshes can later be added to the 3d file, skinned to one of the rigs, and exported. (easy)
-have to remember that each new piece of mesh clothing must be duplicated to fit all body meshes. (The issue here is that if we have made 50-100 pieces of mesh clothing, and we want to add a new body mesh, all of these meshes need to be fitted to the new body mesh before it is ready :p)
300 ~ish ep tutorial of making an RPG from scratch.
