Skinned Cloth Combine Skinned Mesh?

Unity Engine
1

Hey everyone,

So I have an interesting problem and I’m not sure how or even if I can or should solve it. I have a character who uses skinned cloth and I remember reading the best way to control the cloth was to only apply it to the object that needs to be affected. So, I have my character as one mesh and the dress she wears as a totally separate mesh. (controlled by the same skeleton of course)

-Character (SkinnedMeshRender)
-Dress (SkinnedCloth)

This way the skinned cloth only affects the vertices that need it and not the entire base mesh which wouldn’t even have any Skinned Cloth movement applied to it.

Now for the issue. Should I be concerned with trying to combine the meshes, or is this even possible when one is skinned cloth? Right now my character is two different meshes on the same skeleton and I remember reading that in order to increase performance it should only be one skinned mesh renderer.

This is going to be a high quality game intended to have next-gen visuals and be run on good or better PCs. So am I worrying about something I shouldn’t? Is a few minor extra renders going to really cripple my game later, I mean I have it under control only a few characters should end up with this set up.

Or should I just use the skinned cloth renderer on the entire character and keep it to one skinned mesh renderer? Does anyone know the performance effects of including 7-8thousand extra vertices that have the skinned cloth attached but are set to “0s” so they aren’t affected?

2

I’ll speak for the little experience I have while messing with the cloth component. It is advisable to use separate skinned meshes rather than having a single mesh and assigning non-cloth vertices zero since the latter approach is quite costly.

3

nielsmillikan,

I figured as much, I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t some super secret thing I didn’t know about. Glad someone else’s knowledge mimics my own.

Thanks.