in games such as fable, morrowind and world of warcraft, changing gear means a change in the look of the character model. my question is: does the engine change the entire mesh, or does it just leave the body as it is, add the new gear and parent it to the appropriate body part?
thanks,
Hiya.
I’m pretty sure that it depends totally on the particular game engine in question. Morrowind, IIRC, replaces the “body part”. Fable, again IIRC, adds the item “on top of” the body part. If I had to take a guess, I’d say that game engines with good bone animation/structures would do it as Fable…and engines that use straight IK/vertex animations do it the Morrowind way.
Of course, this is all conjecture…but it seems right to me. 
yeah that sounds right, probably use of decent envelopes, rather than individual vertex values, would and will continue to be even more important with higher res models, and overlying clothes acsessories.
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