could you use the same rig in unity for two characters that use the same body parts but just different clothing

[The doctor is in]

ok so if you created two characters that used the same body parts and different clothings could you use the same rig in unity?

[mouxe]

Yes, you should be able to use them interchangeably using Mecanim.

[BadTertle]

If the goal is to have clothing options for your character that you can switch, you may want to consider using Blender or another 3d package to simply add the other clothing options to the one character rig, copy the skin weights from the body to the new clothes, and controlling their visibility in Unity.

[The doctor is in]

ok thanks!

[Mateodon]

I'm curious about this as well, specifically with regards to auto rigging.

If I auto rig one model could I then just .obj export duplicates of that model in different outfits, and do the skin weight copy thing in Blender?

Or would I need to auto rig a model for each outfit? Or would I export them to .obj first, stack all the clothes on one model in Blender, then auto rig that?

[BadTertle]

Autorigs actually work best the more nude a model is. So many items on top of each other tend to end up looking like a blob to the autorigger and it can get a bit funky.

You will want to end up with all outfits skinned to the same skeleton (or perhaps a copy of the skeleton if you have a lot of them, but definitely the same proportions,etc).

So I think the best thing to do is to autorig the nude (or smallest outfit if you want to make use of occluded polygon deletion) model and copy weights to all of your clothing items.

I have the beginnings of an idea of a good way to handle this use case in-app to avoid all of this workaround stuff, but it needs more thought and is quite a big feature to implement.

[Mateodon]

Thanks. So it sounds like your saying I can .obj export the duplicates and transfer skin weights to make the clothes work with the auto rigged version. Excellent.

Good to know that too many clothes can gum up the auto rig. Is it a quantity issue like too many items, even small ones could mess it up, or is a proportions issue where an extremely bulky item could cause problems?

An in-app solution would be ideal, though I've been reading up on Blender's Transfer Weights feature and it doesn't seem too tough. I'll give it a try tomorrow.

[BadTertle]

Its more about the bulk and lack of definition of shoulders\etc. On a normal autorig, your mesh is transformed into a simplified shape that all the calculations are made on, and the system can start putting joints in more awkward places. Its actually less of an issue through Fuse direct uploads though, since we can send up some metadata that helps the process (you dont even have to place markers), but for the sake of ease of transferring weights, you probably want the whole body as one mesh to transfer from.

I'm imagining for the future some kind of wardrobe functionality, where you can save whole outfits and choose to export with outfits a, b, and d...something like that. It would help for things like uniforms that all your characters have the same clothing without needing to make and load each individual item preset separately, and could enable people to export sets of switchable clothing... Definitely needs a lot of thought and planning to make something like that intuitive and implemented well, maybe a Fuse 1.4 feature if all goes well on the concept.

[Mateodon]

I succeeded in applying clothing to an auto rigged model using Blender's Transfer Weights, it's definitely not the most convenient workflow but it'll do for the time being.

I had to reapply surface smoothing and scale down the clothing to make it fit the auto rigged model though. I don't know why Blender didn't import the scale and smoothing, is it possible to make Fuse export to another format (.dae maybe) ?

[BadTertle]

Blender imports the obj at a different scale?? Gross... Well, if you determine the correct scale value you'll need for Blender, you can set that as an export option from Fuse to do it on export so you just have to type it in once in the settings instead of for each clothing item individually.

[Mateodon]

Scaling's no big deal, in fact I just ended up scaling the rigged model to match the clothes. Applying smoothing is a little more tedious though, I can't figure out why it's not importing that data.

But I've encountered a bigger issue than lost surface smoothing, that being lost blendshapes. The original model has blendshapes for facial expressions, but my clothed blender export no longer has them.

I thought I could just drag the clothes onto the original since they were weighted onto an identical rig, but they aren't animating. The clothes do animate just fine on the model they were exported with, so I currently have clothed models with blank faces and naked models that can make facial expressions.