I wasn’t sure where exactly to post this, but I figured it would fall in line with game design. I’m new to the whole game design work, I took a class on how to make simple 2D platformers, etc but I want to know how on some games you can switch characters clothes. In things such as Rust, Fallout, Dark Souls, etc is it a simple script that equipping it alters the look the look of the character to portray the certain item you’re wearing? I’ve looked over the internet to figure out how it exactly works but couldn’t find an answer.
I’m sorry if this is the wrong section to post this, I’m new to this site and 3D games in general so I apologize if this is kind of nooby question for game design.
The answer is that there are many ways to do this and a lot of it depends on how you’ve implemented your characters, what items you want them to be able to swap etc…
It’s easy to swap things like textures and materials, you can just change the material assigned to a character or part of a character on the fly without any issues. It’s harder when you want to change a mesh for a skinned character as you have to start doing some trickier things like combining skinned meshes into a single mesh with sub meshes so that it all animates correctly and depending on what platform you’re targeting you can also try combining them all to a single mesh without sub meshes as well as combine textures too to reduce drawcalls.
Anyway, without knowing more about your game and how you intend to implement your characters, 3D/2D, static/animated, etc, and what items you intend to be customisable then it’s hard for anyone to give you more specific tips and pointers.
One way is to build everything with standard attachment points. So even though you might have a dozen shield types, they all fit into the characters hand the same way. And so forth.
I think the old way to do what you’re asking would be to have a completely different model already wearing the outfit. But the modern approach now that we have better hardware is to, as @Kiwasi suggested, use attachment/mount points and lay new models & gameobjects on top of existing ones.
If you look into transforms and parenting you’ll find an easy to to create attachment points.