• Im asuming il need to define a set of points on all character models chest, back and shoulder area and then a matching set of points on all pieces of chest armor.
  
• When moddeling the chest armor every one of these points could be a bone and the vertices will be weight painted to these bones.
  
• When moddeling the characters il create extra bones (one for each of these "points") that extend from the existing bones in the character. These bones will likely end on the surface of the characters skin.
  

• If a character then has a piece of chest armor equiped il connect the bones of the chest armor to the special armor connecting bones of the character.
  
• Il then transform the bones in the chest armor by the difference between them and the ones in the character. Il define a "center" bone on both the charcter model and the chest armor. the armors center point will be placed on the characters "chest armor center point".
  
• Might make sense to make an simple algorithm that first scales the armor as a whole to the extent where as little as possible transformation needs to take place in the above mentioned point.
  

About the bones. I would probably draw the naked character model in one call and all pieces of armor in their own calls (using only the bones applicable to the armor) so I dont see why uniform limit would be an issue. The "connection bones" in the character model wont be sent to shaders for rendering the naked body since no vertices are connected to them.

The reason I think going the bone route would be less work in my case is because when I have alot of different items (possibly 100's) and I decide to add another slightly differently shaped humanoid model to the game the morph approach should (in my mind) force me to create extra morphs for all existing items whereas with the bone approach I would not need to modify existing item models when a new humanoid model gets created.

With the morph approach i need to modify potentionaly 100's of items each time i make a new humanoid model

With the bone approach i need to only define the extra bones in each character model. no need to modify any existing models.

Is my logic flawed somewhere?

Il find it an acceptable tradeoff to loose some flexibility if I can save alot of time moddeling. The game is cell shaded and models dont have a terrible amount of detail so as long as it works and it actualy saves time il be happy. I have allready thought of a couple of ways to hide small pieces of the characters body that will inevitably stick through the armor using the bones approach :D

Ah. I didnt think about generating the morphs like that offline. Im going to go ahead and implement it like I was thinking and then when (and if) I get an acceptable implementation Il consider (depending on how it preforms) to generate the morphs offline instead with a script.

If some unforseen reason why this wont work crops up Il just have to revert to moddeling all the morphs by hand.. wont be terrible I might just severly lessen the amount of races in my game or elves humans and orcs will all use the same base mesh :D

Thnx a lot!