I'm currently planning on developing a simple 3d game and I decided to start by developing my character (Don't misinterpret this with: "I jumped into this without thinking it through", because I've been planning this for about a year now).
To get to the point... the character's most noteworthy aspect (and also most troublesome) is the longcoat that he is wearing and when I animate him, I want the longcoat to react like... a longcoat. Keeping in mind that I want to keep the poly count as low as possible, how do I go about modeling my character. Should I model the person and longcoat all in one object? Or should I model the person and longcoat separatly?
If it's the latter, what is the best way to merge the two in order to get as "clean" of an animation as possible?

- cheers

If he doesn't have any costume changes, you might as well model it as one object. Clothing animations have to be coordinated with the character's other movements, the same way you would animate long hair on a character. Flexible things hanging off a character, whether hair or cloth or rope/chains/a tail/whatever, typically move like a sine wave, a ripple moving from the part attached to the character to the part swinging free. The simplest thing to do is have you are a friend wear a longcoat and videotape this person doing all the actions you want your character to do in the game so you can capture how the cloth moves.

If he doesn't have any costume changes, you might as well model it as one object. Clothing animations have to be coordinated with the character's other movements, the same way you would animate long hair on a character. Flexible things hanging off a character, whether hair or cloth or rope/chains/a tail/whatever, typically move like a sine wave, a ripple moving from the part attached to the character to the part swinging free. The simplest thing to do is have you are a friend wear a longcoat and videotape this person doing all the actions you want your character to do in the game so you can capture how the cloth moves.

Thank you for the advice. I'll model everything in one object, but that's going to complicate things a bit. For example, how am I going to simulate the muscles under the clothes which will be vital when it's time to rig, and (later on) animate?

[quote name='sunandshadow' timestamp='1341001716' post='4954075']
If he doesn't have any costume changes, you might as well model it as one object. Clothing animations have to be coordinated with the character's other movements, the same way you would animate long hair on a character. Flexible things hanging off a character, whether hair or cloth or rope/chains/a tail/whatever, typically move like a sine wave, a ripple moving from the part attached to the character to the part swinging free. The simplest thing to do is have you are a friend wear a longcoat and videotape this person doing all the actions you want your character to do in the game so you can capture how the cloth moves.

Thank you for the advice. I'll model everything in one object, but that's going to complicate things a bit. For example, how am I going to simulate the muscles under the clothes which will be vital when it's time to rig, and (later on) animate?
[/quote]
The muscles under the clothes? In the case of a model with no costume changes you model only the surface and use bones to rig. The surface is clothes following the contours of muscles, but there aren't actually any muscles under there, just the surface. The animator animates changes in the contour to simulate the movement of muscles and cloth and bones alike.