Hello, I want to model and animate some human beings. In the game you will be capable of wearing different clothings. A basic male is finished but how do I let him wear cloth? I was thinking of seperate models, like a trousers or a shirt, which use the same skelleton as the basic model. The problem I see is the underlaying modell which will pop through the shirt when animated. Also the z-Buffer might be a problem where some ugly artifacts will appear. Do you have a idea or another approach of doing clothing? Or maybe a keyword to search for, since for clothing and cloth I found only physical cloth simulation... Thanks in advance.

Well it sounds like you are trying to do cloth animation and if you are doing that seperate, you are going to have to do cloth physics to make sure the players body doesnt poke through the cloth. Why not just animate the cloth with the player at the same time.

Thanks for the reply, but I think you got me wrong.

I'm not into cloth simulation.

It's more that, what many RPGs do. You have a character and several pieces of cloth, which you can combine (to some degree) freely. So you can't create for each possible combination a seperate complete character.

I don't think, that there is a "best way" here. But do you have some directions you can point me, which are approaches to this?

I doubt this is how it's done professionally, but:

Why not separate your characters into groups of models (head, torso, bottom), and have different models for each set of clothing? I'm not talking about a model that goes over the torso - I'm talking about a new torso model that includes the clothing.

It would be easier than trying to render clothing over your model, and would also save on the amount of vertices you must store/process.

Cheers,
--Brian

When you are talking of sepearating, you are also talking about groups like forearm and upper arm, right? The basic character is set up out of a group of around 15 objects, which can be set visible separatly.

So when the character only weares a waistcoat, for example (the torso-part would be replaced by the waitcoat), the model will look like a roboter, speaking exaggeratedly. Since there will be a visible cut between the arm parts.

Or am I getting you wrong with what you where saying?

I had also thought of having different Models, which spare some basic parts.
Something like:
basic mesh - everything visible, one single mesh
"waistcoat" mesh - torso part hidden (vertices deleted)
"t-shirt" mesh - torso + (part of) upperarm hidden
...

But this also includes having for each "waistcoat" mesh also a "waistcoat + short trousers" mesh and a "waistcoat + long trousers" mesh...

This will be less than the combination of possible cloth parts, but it's still to big.