Character customization

Hello!
Firstly, wonderful people on this forum; very helpful, so thanks for that!
I've re-written this post about 100x because Im so confused and unsure if I can get across what im after properly, so I'll post some images instead..

How can I go about replicating this effect?


Original

Modified



I would like my characters to have -
Customizable bodies
Many outfit choices
Clothing damage

(In Blender, I've tried to use shapekeys for the body customization & solidify for clothing, but the combination just doesn't work)
(I would also like to try and keep everything vanilla, so no use of 3rd party scripts or anything since im most after learning..(it also feels a bit like cheating, to me ))

If I've observed properly, clothing damage is just (alpha)textures + small extra mesh pieces shown above a regular full mesh for tear effects (like the hanging black part on the left above the belt)

This model in blender also has the ability to somehow get accurate scaling body parts despite not having blend shapes/shapekeys or drivers (300% skillful wizardry if you ask me), nor is this available in-game

 

How do you know? Are you viewing this model in Blender, Unity, or is this just in a game that you are looking at?

 

Viewing it in blender I found this out
Also thank you for the response

 

Just2Ask, I hope you're not too disappointed but I didn't respond because I know the answer, but rather because I'm interested in maybe trying something like this for myself sometime.

How are you scaling the body parts, though. Did the author create some sort of handles attached to the model?

One way I've heard of doing this is simply using bones on skinned mesh. Normally, bones in Unity are only used for animation (and that animation has rotations and maybe position changes) but you can also scale bones as well and it will scale the vertices mapped to that bone according to the vertex weight.

Edit: Thinking about it some more- Blender also has a lot of other fancy features that just don't import in to Unity. I don't know them all but there could be some other mesh deformation module other than blend shapes. The author may have even written their own utility in Python script for all I know. Is this model something that I'd be able to download for free, or was there a licensing-cost?

 

Im just glad that it got a response at least; I usually get none in other places i've ever asked for help or anything..
This usually brings some sort of in-sight of some kind too, from what I've seen in other posts, so I am very grateful

The parts in the image were scaled by a 3rd party program; that image is in-game
Im confused since apparently it is simply scaling the bones, but when I tried this on my own model & others in blender, the scaling looked atrocious, yet the same game model when in blender and scaled produces the same result as in-game.
I can provide the model for you if you like; its just a blend file
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jgSY7vnWWFilJYe0QLPqtY9DF6aEnYCG/view?usp=sharing

And thanks again for the response

 

This solution worked!
https://forum.unity.com/threads/scaling-bones.44596/#post-3757285

Ok I have a work around for this, if anyone else is interested.

Lets say I want to scale up a characters upper arms to make them look more muscular, but I don't want to mess up the scaling of the lower arms/hands.

What I do is add an extra bone that is a child of the upper arm and runs parallel to the upper arm. This new bone has no children. I use the new bone for scaling the arm, and the original bone for rotating it. The new bone has all the weighting (the old bone has no vertex weights at all, it doesn't need them because it has the new bone as a child).

Now I can scale the upper arm as I want with the lower arm staying the same.

Hope this helps someone.
- Zomby 138

+

Duplicating the bones will not assign the proper weights to the new bone, since each vertex group is assigned according to the bone group / name.
You need to copy the weights from the original bone to the helper bone. Or renaming the vertex group to the new bone.
-ikazrima

Im literally crying rightnow
Honestly, thanks to all 3 of you!

 

Look also at UMA

 

Look at UMA
If you don't want to use it, that's fine, tear it apart and study how it works. It does EVERYTHING you're looking for (customizable bodyparts, driving change with bones, customizable clothing, layered clothing/decals/etc)

 

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