I know that the creation of a character is called a mesh, and to customize meshes one could apply mesh swapping or mesh stitching.
If I'm correct, for the above mentioned features mesh stitching should be applied.. therefore the designer should create:

- 4 meshes of the eyes (black / brown / blue / green)
- 8 meshes of the hair (4 meshes of the 4 colors with short hair + 4 meshes of the 4 colors with long hair)
- 2 meshes of the body (white / black) - the body will have a karate suit

This would work, but is not the optimal way of doing it.

If you did it that way you would have 14 meshes and 14 textures(If you use normal maps it could be up to 28 textures.), this would make your game large and slow it down a bit.

You would make 1 mesh body and head, then 1 short hair and 1 long hair mesh, this will be 3 meshes total.

The body would use a texture and the hair with cell-shading could be a single color, or a texture each, that is 1 or 3 textures.

Now to change the color of the meshes you will use a color mask, this will allow you to make all the parts any color you want.

So 3 meshes 1 texture or 3 textures.(If you use normal maps 2 or 6 textures)

** And who does the cell shading part, the designer of the mesh or the 3D animator?

Some 3D artist know the basic shaders.

Normally graphics programmers make the shaders and other special effects.

As scouting Ninja mentioned above, you are mixing up the 3D artists part of the work and the technical part (Shaders in this case).

Read up some information about what a shader is... this will help you a lot in the future. Because shaders in modern game engines can do a lot more than simple basic gourad shading... for example cell shading in your case.

Or they could do cell shading with a color mask as input, and parameterizable color inputs (so your players could choose any RGB value as eye colors... how cool is that?). All the artist has to do in this case is create a single mesh, a single set of texture maps (diffuse, normal, gloss, whatever your cell shader needs as input), as well as an additional set of color masks (think B/W images where the parts that should be affected by the color input are white, the others are black).

The rest will be handled by your shader. Depending on what engine you use, and what your budget is, you might be able to achieve that with off the shelf shaders.... at least for Unity there are already shaders like that available in the asset store, altough I haven't seen one that supports cell shading yet.

Of course, you can reach out to the devs of these shaders in the Unity forum, they might be willing to add a cell shading option to their asset.

Mesh defomration is a little bit more difficult to handle. Depending on your needs, your artist WILL need to model multiple meshes (if the mesh shape is extremly different, like with different hairstyles, that is the best solution).

Things like different body types COULD be solved with a mesh deformation system. Of course, this is not that simple to achieve, I haven't seen any off the shelf asset yet that does it, though there might be tutorials on it on the web as plenty of peoples have tried it in the past.

What such a system does is that you have a base mesh (or multiples / parts) that can be deformed / stretched based on player input during character creation (I think you also have played around with such a system in some MMO).

Then everything needs to be baked together in the end, maybe the textures needs to be replaced or adjusted.

Again, that gives player a wider range of choices, while it MIGHT save your artist some time at the cost of a technically more complex system for your character creation. If you can get a premade system somewhere, might be worth it.

I really like to thank all of you for taking your time to explain this to me!

Now to change the color of the meshes you will use a color mask, this will allow you to make all the parts any color you want.

(so your players could choose any RGB value as eye colors... how cool is that?)

That is exactly what I would like to hear..

So basically, the way you could choose a color on the right side of this picture could be done per feature I want the color to be changed..

Mesh defomration is a little bit more difficult to handle. Depending on your needs, your artist WILL need to model multiple meshes (if the mesh shape is extremly different, like with different hairstyles, that is the best solution).

Things like different body types COULD be solved with a mesh deformation system. Of course, this is not that simple to achieve, I haven't seen any off the shelf asset yet that does it, though there might be tutorials on it on the web as plenty of peoples have tried it in the past.

Nah, I won't go to the extreme to make different body types for the main character.. but I do understand that each type of hairstyle needs his own mesh.

A mesh is just the geometry, not the color (ignore vertex colors for now). So, you just need one mesh (bald male with karate suite) and a couple of hair meshes. Coloring is done either per texture or per shader and in the simplest case you would only recolor the existing textures.

Yes, that is what I learned today.. got me thinking that a mesh should be made for every color! LOL!

It is often cheaper to buy existing art, eg one of these karate fighters at turbosquid. But you would need to tailor these models/animation/rigs to your requirements.

This right here is what's going to keep me busy today, I didn't even know there were sites like this.. however the way I looked at it is that when hiring people who already created fighting characters that I could basically adjust / tailor their meshes as well to save time. Little did I know it's available on the internet as well.