Character Model/Animation in Blender > Game Design in Unity Workflow (Clothes?)

For our game we are creating the character models in Blender and planning on doing the animations for the characters in Blender than importing the characters and the animations into Unity. The user will not be controlling the characters in our game, the game will launch pre-made animations based on user choices. However the user will have the ability to change clothing and possible fur dyes for the characters in the game.

How would adding clothing and possibly fur dyes to the workflow? Once the character models and animations are done can you add different clothing to the models in unity? Can you add fur dyes to the model in unity? Would you have to create multiple animations and character models with the different combos of clothing and fur dyes and import?

Sorry if this is a really noob question but this is out first game and I want to understand the best practice for this type of workflow.

 

Fur dyes is your specifically made tintable material jsut for your game. Your character textures would need to have a tint map to specify dyable areas, and this is something you'd need to program.

Clothing are a different skinned mesh attached to the same skeleton.

Basically, clothing do not affect the animation in any way (unless you want them to have bones), as long as they're attached to the same skeleton.

Both can be a bit tricky, but you can google "unity modular character tutorial/example" and check out "UMA" on asset store.

 

it's an advanced thing predicated on knowledge about several different disciplines.

you need to know:

how skeletons work in 3d engine

how animations work in 3d engine

how to rig characters

how to retarget animations


that's all before you get to writing the actual scripts.

For the scripting part unity makes it somewhat straightforward. The clothes and character are all bound to same skeleton, calling the same animations. You only need to make a mesh visible or not.


There is about 1,000 steps within each of the major steps, thats why I say it's advanced. Somebody could write you ten pages of instructions but you won't be able to do anything with it if you don't have the prerequisite knowledge.

If you focused 100% on this one problem you may be able to come up with a solution in a few months. Not to discourage, just set expectations and understand you'll need to cover the basics thoroughly before you startt seeing real progress.

 

Thanks have you seen any videos or guides that discuss this process?

 

No, because I'm familiar with every step of the process and do not need guides or tutorials.

To have an idea of how tinting would work, take a look at Sims 3 pattern textures, for example. You'll be doing something similar, but with fewer channels.
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Tutorials:Sims_3_Custom_Patterns

You can also ask more specific questions....

 

Thanks neginfinity.

 

A video to guide you through the process would be thousands of hours long. You might find videos for litlte bits and pieces, but to make it work for your needs, and to be able to troubleshoot when problems arise, you'll just have to have the prerequisite knowledge - the subjects I mentioned.

The only other way around learning all that is to hire help, but that's not a small job even for someone with a lot of experience. And it involves multiple disciplines.

You can google "skankerzero modular character guide" and that will give you a link to an old article at polycount that gives rough gameplan, but there is no step by step guide because it must be at least a million steps, and the order they go in totally depends on your specific needs.

To give some perspective, I studied general 3d character art for a couple years almost exclusively before I made a system similar but much simpler than what you are describing. It took me a few months to build the system and I was working with an experienced programmer. In the end we just opted to change hats and faces only because the rest was simply too much work. Nevermind the figuring out how to build the whole system, once you do, to fill it with content is a serious amount of grunt work. Not just to produce the art, but to make it all work together. It really requires a team.

It may be easier if you have a super low poly style, but to design the system you still got to know at least on a surface level how to rig, animate, and deal with skeletal assets in engine as well.

It's a worthy goal, I just hope you understand that in order to accomplish it, there is a certain amount of knowledge and experience you'll have to have. And then a certain amount of man-hours, because art just takes time.

 

@KaraZee Here are a couple of articles I wrote on the topic a few years ago. For the most part it's still valid, but it should be noted that there are several ways of doing what you want to do, and I just provide one of those.

 

@aer0ace Thanks!