Does anyone know how to do that? I mean I can make and animate stuff, but what I mean is, if I make multiple armor sets for a character in a 3D game using blender, how would I go about giving that character a different set of armor and putting a different weapons in his hand? Would I have to go through the headache of linking that armor set to every individual animation that I originally had? Which could be like 50 to 100? I'm kind of in the dark here. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

You give the different models different attach bones and attach separate meshes to those bones depending on what they have equipped. So you wouldn't have to attach them to the animations at all, just model them so that they work with the animations with as little clipping as possible.

Rendering would be a straight forward lookup in a map of meshes depending on the inventory that the player has equipped. Then you just render the mesh somehow passing the attach bone as argument so that the mesh gets the correct offset and orientation.

The "art" here is literally art. You must model the meshes for your items specifically with the locomotion/character animations in mind. Armor needs to have the correct gaps/seams/etc so that they work with all character animations.

-me

For soft armour such as chainmail you'd rig it to the same skeleton as your character so your character animations just work. You'd usually need to do something to remove or replace the geometry beneath the armour, though, or you'll get poke-through.

Quote:

Original post by Palidine You give the different models different attach bones and attach separate meshes to those bones depending on what they have equipped. So you wouldn't have to attach them to the animations at all, just model them so that they work with the animations with as little clipping as possible. Rendering would be a straight forward lookup in a map of meshes depending on the inventory that the player has equipped. Then you just render the mesh somehow passing the attach bone as argument so that the mesh gets the correct offset and orientation. The "art" here is literally art. You must model the meshes for your items specifically with the locomotion/character animations in mind. Armor needs to have the correct gaps/seams/etc so that they work with all character animations. -me

Well, I can put a different texture over the armor and call it something different, but I was planning to completely change the geometry of the armor so it actually will be a different set of armor.

What Palidine meant was, to attach the armour models to the player model. I think this works fine for weapons and other items that don't overlap that much, but works less well for things like body armour.

What's often done in such situations is that another model is made, based on the exact same skeleton (and therefor it can use the same animations), but with a different mesh.
Some games like Half-Life have a modular model file format, which allows the model to be compiled from various mesh parts, where some parts can be substituted for others quite easily. For example, the soldiers in that game all used the same body, but there were several head meshes they could choose from, and several weapon meshes. If the game you're modelling for doesn't have such a system in place, then you'd have to create a new model, but there's still no need to redo all the animations. Just use the same skeleton and animation data.

EDIT: Heh, that's basically what PlayerX already stated. I wouldn't make the armour overlap the body though, but swap the default body mesh for it instead. :)

NWN used a different model for every body part

head /helmet
neck
chest
arms
forarms
hands / gloves
belt (things like chainmail skirts would hand from belts)
crotch
thighs
lower legs
feet

Every part could be mixed and matched with every other part (and recolored).

Well, when I said you'd need to remove or replace the geometry beneath the armour, I intended that to possibly mean swapping out the body part. I was perhaps a bit too general. :)

So what would I have to do in max to get that type of result Vampyre?

I want to narrow it down a little more to something like...

Head
body
arms
hands
leggs
feet

Each of those would have several different meshes, such as plate, chain, cloth, etc etc, with different shapes and textures.

I want to be able to have one animation, such as 'attack1' and be able to swapp out any body part for another body part, and still be able to use the same animation 'attack1'

So what steps do I need to take in 3ds max to do that?

I'm using DX Studio for my project, and they have some built in attach commands, so I could do an object.attach("stringName", "subGroup", true, true, true);

What that will do is attach one object to another, with the optional subgroup name, and then have the option to match the origonal objects location, rotation, and scale.

So in code, I could just remove one object, 'basicHands1' for 'basicHands2', this part I know how to do, but what do I need to do in 3ds Max to be able to do this?

Do I use Bi-Ped for my animations, then create attach points for my different mesh objects, or do I create sperate bones for each mesh object, such as helmBones, armBones, tunicBones, etc, attach them alltogether, then create my animations???

I haven't been able to find a good step by step process for this.