Putting clothes and armor on characters.

Okay- as our team has been working on our project, we're starting to understand why other teams put up a new snapshot every time they get a model in game. It's darned near impossible. Between horrible exporting issues, few to no mainstream tools that support Torque's file formats... *rant, rant*

Anyway, we finally have a character model textured, rigged (mount nodes, level of detail), and animated, and in game. We have tested mount nodes by attaching a weapon to the character's animated arm, and all seems to be well. Thing is, there's a big jump between having a single weapon attached to a single node and what we want.

Before we press on, we really just need to hear from somebody who's done it before- get some advice, talk to some people who know what they're doing.

Our players will have their base model (the "naked" body), and then interchangeable clothing / armor, and we need to know what the best method of implementing this is. Assume, for our purposes, that the player will be able to customize their base model's texture, to allow for variations in skin color and things like tattoos, chest hair, scars- whatever.

Originally, we had envisioned just having everything mounted as seperate models over the body. The shirt would be a seperate model, mounted to the hip, chest, shoulders, elbows, and wrists. The pants would be a seperate model, mounted to the hip, knees, and ankles. Shoes would be seperate models mounted to the ankles and toes. You get the picture. Certain pieces would be layered: chestplates would be larger than shirts, and would also be mounted to the hip, chest, and shoulders, and would lay over the shirt.

If this method works, I would be enthralled. In theory, we could have some hidden-faces culling methods implemented to help out with the framerate, and as long as we have a clearly defined limit for how "thick" shirts can be and how "loose" armor has to be, we would be alright, ne? Again- we don't know, and we haven't tried. We're asking for your advice.

Another option that's popped up is having only a few certain things be mounted: armor, gloves, shoes, and headgear. Things like shirts and pants would be painted on to the body. Question is- is this feasible? We don't want to actually change the body's texture altogether- we still need the player's skin texture for parts that aren't covered by the shirt/pants/whatever. Is it possible to use multitexturing to paint the shirt over the skin texture? If so, what is the FPS damage done?

If this method works, I would not be extremely disappointed, although I think that having "baggy" clothing adds a good deal of style and quality to characters. Of course, we could always have parts of the clothing mounted- like fluffy sleeves or loose collars. The advantage to this method is that we don't have any sort of limitation on how "tight" armor can be.

The last option we considered was simply condensing the shirt, chest armor, and pants into one thing- a "suit" or an "outfit". If this is the case, then we can just have interchangeable bodies altogether, and have parts of the body that are not covered by clothing/armor be UVmapped to the player's skin texture, and the rest UVmapped to the clothing/armor texture sheet. This does allow for both customizable skin tone/design and customizable clothing/armor. We could also add in mounted accessories, as well as gloves, shoes, and headgear.

If this method works, we'd probably save it as a last resort, though. I mean, condensing equipment down that much seems like you're killing the idea of personalization altogether, and we wouldn't want that.


Anyway- your input on each of these ideas, as well as any ideas you may have or methods you have used in the past would be appreciated. We have modelers ready to work on this, as soon as we figure out the process. Thank you very much for the help.