Exchanging gear and clothes from char models

[Elminster]

Hi, it may sound a little noob, but I was wondering which is the best way to create a character model (object and animation) that can change gear and clothes like in RPGs or MMORPGs in which you can have lot’s of armors/clothes or weapons like swords, axes, bows, etc. Should I build and animate the character “naked” and then create the different objects and animate them separately making the movements coincide with those of the character (exporting 1 file for the character and 1 for every other object) or should I create a whole animation with all the possibilities of clothes/gear and export it in 1 BIG file?... I guess it could depend on the engine I should be using but frankly I’m at a loss in this.

Thanks in advance for any help u could give me in this :)

[Reedbeta]

I would advise you use skeletal animation, and keep the animations separate from the models (assuming that it works to use the same animations for all clothing styles, etc). Don't model the character's whole body naked unless you want them to be able to appear naked - you don't want to have polygons for the clothes and unseen polygons for the skin underneath, as this would be a waste of polys. For clothes, just create different body models (things like the head, hands can stay the same) and rig them all using the same skeleton. For things like gear and weapons, usually what is done is to label certain bones (e.g. the hands) as "attachment points", and create the gear models in the coordinate system of this bone. Then you can bring them seamlessly into the skeletal animation system and they will be animated with the character.

[Elminster]

Thanks a lot for your advices, I’ll try to do that. But I still have some little doubts. If I understand correctly what you say is that if I want, for example, to have 2 different armors (composed of let’s say, pants and breastplate) I should create full models for each peace of armor? (models for the character wearing: breastplate1, pants1, breastplate1 + pants1, pants2 + breastplate1, … etc). The same goes to if I want to give some choices about the character's head for example, like different faces or hair styles. Would it mean I need to have whole different models? (or maybe in the case of hair the concept of “attachment points” u mention could be applied)

[Methulah]

Basically you have a skeleton, bones no geometry. You have named some joints as "attachment points." Then you have difernt models for each piece you would want to attach to your skeleton.

For example, your Sword001.x file might have a bone on it that is called "sword_attach" and your main player skeleton has a bone called "weapon_attach_one_handed". Then when the player selects "Sword001" out of his inventory, the code tells the "weapon_attach_one_handed" bone to load the file "sword001.x" and attach itself to the bone "sword_attach".

this method can be used for differnt hairstyles, armour, clothes, shoes, helmets, horns (if you get evil like in Fable) and basically anything. Only have geonmetry for the actual naked player if you want to be able to se him naked. For example, in my MMORPG, my helmet model goes over my face model, because not all helmets are full faced and I want face to be able to show.

So in answer to your question, you only need to make models for each piece of armour, not the charatcer wearing them aswell.

Hope that helps.

[Elminster]

Thx a lot that REALLY helps me to get a better idea about how to do this =)