Rigging and skinning a game character in pieces.

I’m wanting to know the best way to make different game outfits for a character. I want to be able to switch out between a couple different torsos and still have the same head model and rigging with animations still working.

I’m not sure if this is the best way or not but I detached a cylinder into two separate pieces. Then I skinned and weight painted one half of the cylinder, weight painting the seam 50% to both bones and decreased that amount as I went father away from the seam. Then doing the same thing to the other half of the cylinder.

For example if this was the game character I would detach his arms, legs, and head from his torso and do the same thing I did with the cylinder. I’ve included a link to a video of the cylinder bending.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=RBrVEEFn-rc

Thanks a lot for your time.