animating Clothes, possible ?

#1 Mesh hiding is typically how it is done. That way the mesh conforms to the skeleton and will animation with it. If you use mount points something like a chest plate with shoulder/arm pads won't work properly with arm rotation. Unless someone comes up with some kind of other way for the material to kind of "glue" to the body shape/position it is kind of hard to do it anyway else.

If anyone has some alternative ideas I would love to hear them though. Perhaps some kind of fancy cloth Physics or something.

#2 Physics cloth would be cool, as mentioned in another thread about a pink cat tail =P

Anyway, was researching and heres another possible method.
http://www.torquepowered.com/community/blog/view/13881/

Apparently he rigged the engine such what it would call an animation on the mounted dts. The thread starter disappeared too :P

#3 Unfortunately that's the way things work here... people create cool stuff, leave, and never release what they worked on even though they're not going to use it.

Anyway, the concept is sound, having the mounted objects call their own animations whenever the player animates. Then you just animate all of the armor objects on the same skeleton as the player object and give them the same animation names, and you're good to go. In theory.

Mesh hiding only works if you're doing something like WoW, where there are only really a few different "shapes" of armor and lots of textures to make them appear different. WoW is massively dated in terms of graphics, however.

#4 @Henry

I wouldnt say that WoW is dated with regards to graphics. Its actually very modern with regards to what it does and how it does it, but what keeps it looking the way it does is 1) its trying to keep with the "Warcraft" style of art and 2) certain items like the character models just cannot be easily updated and changed. Aside from that you will find everything else that you would expect in a AAA engine plus more. You have pixel shader, post process shaders and other neat things like texture compositing (WoW only swaps a few model parts, but it swaps a lot of textures by using a pre-process render to texture technique to combine a lot of bitmap data down onto 1 texture).

@Cai

There are lots of ways to achieve what you want and it all depends on how much time you want to put into it. You can range from simple mounting, mounting with bones, to hiding and unhiding sub meshes or even extending PhysX in Torque3D to do physx cloth like you see in certain select games. A person could easily come up with a half dozen ways withouth putting much effort in to how to do this, more if they spend a bit more time. The real question is what do you need and what what do you have the resources to pull off, once you figure that out you can do what you feel will benefit you best.

#5 @Logan:

Yeah, I don't mean to imply it's technically dated... I was referring to the comparison you could make between just the character equipment customization elements of WoW and, say, Oblivion. In context, it's not a fair comparison, because the design decisions made for WoW were intended to support massive environments and huge numbers of players without severe slowdown, and they accomplish the job quite well (especially considering when that code was written and how many players per environment they now support). WoW just wouldn't work with Oblivion+ levels of graphics and character customization, but I still think many people would agree that the model customizations appear low detail if you take them out of the WoW context. In other words, if I threw my WoW character into a modern single player RPG, it would appear like a model from an older tech gen.

Mesh hiding is still probably the easiest method, I just meant that it won't realistically support a system for a single-player RPG with large numbers of different armor models because your meshes will become unreasonably huge eventually.