koobas.hobune.stream
armor pieces, different races, male/female characters
Hey guys,
I'm currently trying to figure out the best way to setup a armor system for different characters sizes without to re-design every armor piece.
I've thought about scaling and stretching the mesh, but with this method it wouldn't always work, at least at the point the silhouette of a char changes.
Should I use mesh deformation techniques here or do you suggest another method?
How are games like World of Warcraft or Aion doing that stuff?
I don't know about World of Warcraft or Aion but I remember modding Lineage 2 where every armor had a seperate mesh for each race and gender. With those games the amount of work for this technique doesn't really matter because the quality of the mesh itself is rather lowpoly (mostly < 250 polygons for a complete armor set in Lineage 2). Those games focus on quality textures and sometimes re-use the same armor mesh for a new armor with a new texture.
If you take a look at a game with higher quality meshes (e.g. Skyrim) you'll see that they're using deformation techniques to adjust the armor to the characters body structure. If I remember correctly you were only able to adjust the amount of muscles but not the overall size. So they've one mesh_0 which holds the lowest amount of muscles and another mesh_1 which holds the max amount of muscles and then you start blending between those two based on a slider input.
Furthermore all their races are designed to use the same body structure which makes it fairly simple to re-use a human armor set for a lets say lizard type character. They have different meshes for male/female characters however.
If you really want re-use meshes for different character sizes I'd suggest the deformation technique which requires you to create 4 different meshes for each armor asset (male_0; male_1; female_0 and female_1). Since this is still a lot of work to do I would ask myself if I really need that kind of detail in my game. Usually you can already make your characters look different by changing colors or swaping hairstyles.
