I have a question for how to do something, mostly because I can imagine several ways to do this and wonder which is the right way.
I know that if a model can, for example, use multiple weapons, that you can set the weapons as a child of a hand or arm bone, for example, but what about armor?
For something where armor is part of a character’s model (like an RTS character who only comes in one set of armor) it makes sense that the armored character is the model, but what about in a game where a character might have hundreds of combinations of armor possible and where the armor needs to conform to the character’s animations?
What is the right way to do this?
World of Warcraft solved this by having all the armor a character can ever wear in one file. They then turn on and off the visibility / rendering of certain pieces based on the equipment a player has. (This makes opening the WoW models funny, as all the armor is stacked up quite oddly.)
If I were doing this in Unity with, say, Blender, I’d stack all the armor in a similar way and at export save the armor and the character our as separate FBX objects with animation. In Unity, I’d load the armor and the character in the same place, possibly under a parent null, and synchronize their animations through scripts attached to that parent. Both Armor and Character would have used the same Armature in Blender.
A second solution might be to just have a parent null encapsulate the character and all its armor and to export to one FBX file, then turn off individual child objects within that prefab at runtime. I wouldn’t aim for this since I use Blender for animation and I’ve found that having more than one skinned character in an FBX animation causes issues. However, this would likely work fine from Maya.
There must be a way to tell individual face groups to go invisible in Unity, but I can’t think of how to do it off the top of my head.
I’m not sure if the above is the best solution, but it is a solution. ^_^;
Hey
Build your character, chop him up in pices. Make your armor, skin them all, an armless armor need and arm to go with it, if more tham one you make duplicate arms so all amor parts have a suitible body parts if needed.
But its of course easier if all armor are full plates 
-export all sets as one fbx and get your coders to turn the different armor on and of by your naming con…