I wonder how is 3d characters and clothing/gear made for Mmoprgs? What is purely 3d and what is programmed? When a game has a wide selection of character meshes, especially morphed meshes, and maybe thousands of different costumes where each costume fit every character, how does one produce and assign these things to the character meshes? I am setting up a workflow for the 3d development, but struggling a bit with what to set up first and what could be left for later. I understand that I need the base meshes first, but how about morph targets and costumes?

A while ago I made this thread asking for MMO resources. Some of them, particularly Eternal Lands, let you look directly at their files so you could look at their models and textures and try to find the relevant code for how the client handles them.

I haven't done all the steps of the process myself, but I have experience with these:
- Avatar race and gender concept design
- Avatar base model critique/revision
- Clothing and accessory concept design especially layering (mix-n-match-ability)
- Analyzing what base clothing shapes need to be modeled separately
- Color palette design
- Creating articles of clothing that reuse basic shapes, creating the basic texture, and implementing it for all avatar base models and colors in the standard palette
- Playtest with animations to check for polygon collision and coloring errors

Thanks I'll have a look at it :)