How to add different clothes to rigged character

Question

i'm trying to make a character in modo 601, rig it, animate it and port it to unity 3d. my character will be in different clothes and i want to know the best way to switch between different clothes for one character. how do I manage this?

I'm considering the following:

make nude character, add bones, create clothes on different mesh then parent the clothes to bone? I have no idea how this works!
make nude character, add bones, create clothes on different mesh. rig the clothes with its own pair of bones and animate it with separate key frames with the character's animation?
make character with painted texture as clothes, add bones, create different body parts with different textured clothes on different mesh, hide the body part i want to change clothing and replace it with different mesh? wouldn't there be multiple same characters in my unity project file but just with different clothes?

this is all very confusing. seems like i'm running into problems for every method .i heard unity has a feature to handle this but it only works well if it's equipments with no wrinkles such as hat or weapons.

please help!! i'm so lost :( and try not to post any lengthy answers with complicated terms because i'm new or try not to link me to another post that links me to another post. i already have 30 windows open at the same time on this topic.

Answer 1

So what I do is this:

One skeleton
Body and clothes parented to that skeleton
Many versions of body to fit the clothes - so just forearms, full arms etc - this stops problems with intersections that can happen when animating the skeleton especially on devices where not all of the bone weights are applied at game time.
Load all of currently available clothing into the same game object with only one copy of the skeleton.
Turn on and off the items necessary for the outfit
(Advanced) I use megafiers to modify the meshes based on 3DSMax Morph Channels (make the characters fatter, thinner, different faces, different lengths of boots etc)

What I do next is useful for performance:

Merge the visible skinned meshes using a custom script and custom shader
Turn off all of the parts and use the combined mesh only

The way I configure clothing is also quite complicated. My outfit sets are created as .asset files applicable to the head/upper body/lower body/feet which get combined together - that's going to be too much, so perhaps you just want to create a text file that has the names of the components that should be on/off for each outfit set. You would put this in your project, load it as a TextAsset and read through each of the lines enabling sub meshes listed there and disabling the others.

How to add different clothes to rigged character

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