many pieces skinning question?

[Diependaal]

your uv layout is up to you, if you want high detail, than its important to keep the main things in its own uv layout, the head for example. you could put all its close in one uv set, collapse these things to one mesh, render out its layout, boot separte and all other leather things, and all metal thing maybe.


but when you done allthat, than you can just collapse the whole thing to one mesh and skin it, give the metal parts 100% of influence on a specific bone, or if that doesnt work, make a helper object to the bone, than load that helper object as a bone in your skin modifier, and skin your metal part to the helper, now you can animate the helper, to keep a metal part in its place, you could even put it in an atribute holder, or give the helper some dynamics, the helper doesnt nee dto be a helper object, just some spline object you made, or some mesh, everything is possible.

so in the end youll maybe have 4 tot 5 uv layouts, deside how much you need by looking at the sort of object you have, skin, metal, cloth, leather, hair, you could also use mix material and mask things in one uv set, its up to you.

[Geuse]

I was thinking of using wrap deformers instead. Let's say you do the boot. You use the simple geometry which I had in the beginning before splitting things up and adding details. Then you bind that old geometry to the bone and make it a wrap deformer of the high-detail boot?

Oh, and is there a problem with having several skin clusters to a skeleton or should you really combine the whole model at the end and just bind it so you only need to deal with one skin cluster?

I was thinking of duplicate pieces like gloves and boots. when duplicated and moved over to the other side, should you combine them to a single mesh, just for the boots and the same for the gloves?

[Illusion-shadow]

Depending on your pipeline you have setup, there are different way of approching this. In my company's pipeline, we try to redue the number of meshes as much as possilbe. If we could deal with just one or two mesh, than that's the way we will approach it. The reason for this is we cache out the meshes and load them into another file with the high res mesh for lighting. there are really no right or wrong way of doing this, but I really think less geometry will give you less headache later.

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