mecanim rig only? (no mesh)

I'm playing around with an idea and wondering if anyone has feedback on how to do it better.

I took a mecanim character, deleted the renderer, and then parented a bunch of individual objects to the bones to form a wiremesh looking character made up of floating parts. Animator seems to work fine and the animations look pretty decent in a retro floating body parts kind of way.

Any downsides to doing animation this way? I like this style so far because I can make tons of different characters simply by swapping out the parented game objects, but still use mecanim and it's state machine.

 

Technically, from an animation point, it shouldn't be an issue. You're providing a skin of individual meshes, but it's still a skin, so Unity shouldn't complain at all.

However, with there being individual bits, the normals will likely light differently than they would on a continual mesh character, so rendering may prove to have issues you're not expecting, depending on how the lighting is done.

 

Thanks, that makes sense regarding lighting I'll have to make sure I work that in to the design of the characters. For the most part they will be wiremesh type models so lighting is not much of a factor but there will be the occasional filled sections.