Noob animations: a brief question concerning swappable clothing/accessories.

Unity Engine
1

I’m somewhat familiar with 3d design and beginner to intermediate with Unity. I’m wondering what the best method for creating swappable components for clothing/accessories/armor is. This is mostly to do with using Blender. Is it best to create a skeleton and animations and then create body parts for the skeleton as well as armor parts and then instantiate each individual armor part with a complete animated skeleton? I.E. a chestpiece would have its own skeleton, the head would have its own skeleton, the pants would have their own skeleton and the feet would have their own skeleton.

I simply don’t know where to begin on creating universal animations that can have multiple customizable clothing meshes/body parts work in tandem with it. It it usual to just use an empty marker and parent a chestplate, for example, to the empty marker which follows the base mesh? Or if I want a semi-undressed (base) state for the character mesh, is the whole mesh usually left in tact and clothing overlayed, rather than taking out the vertices for the chest and legs when there are clothes covering it (if the character is wearing a chestplate, for example, there’s no need for the mesh to have a torso)

I’m sorry, I just don’t know where to start with something like this, any pointers to resources would be helpful.

2

Its all up to you mon. You can do it however you want. There isnt a standard or a usual way.

3

There’s not ‘The Way’ to do such a thing. I created a normal humanoid rig, animated it and then got my clothes as extra Objects, which are placed via Empties, which are parented to the specific bones.

This seemed the easiest way for me, because in my game it is needed to have many outfits.

4

I would be interested in hearing how people do this, especially with Mecanim where all the bones are not necessarily exposed. I would guess that people would have a base gameobject with an Animator and multiple skinned mesh renderers that can be swapped in and out in code.