Mesh Attachment Questions

[DrCrook]

I was wondering if it is possible for the following:

Have a basic mesh for our main character, upon killing another character, he can take a peice of their body and attach it to his, and it be visible.

For example, new shoulder pads, so that it attaches to his body, and follows how it should?

What would be the requirements of this? is it possible to have just the one mesh and model several different shoulder pads for him and just "attach" it to him some how and follow the bone movements it needs to or do I need to just export a different full mesh for each shoulder(character and variant shoulder/part)?

Im trying to get an asset list to the artist, but I dont really know the best way to go about this either. Any hints, or existing code that does this already where it works would be AWESOME, because I just dont know where to start with this yet.

[mikepurvis]

Yes, that's totally doable. Your going to have to experiment a bit though.

The closest I did was a gametype mod of UT3 where when you picked up different power ups you changed the mesh into a different creature. The artists where sneaky and used 1 texture for all four creatures, but each UV'd to a different quadrant, so only had to switch the mesh, the texture displayed different for each one.

I'd start by looking and the ammo or gun pickup code, for dropped weapons that give it to the inventory. I haven't done shoulderpads or armor parts so can't say the details on it.

[DrCrook]

Yes, that's totally doable. Your going to have to experiment a bit though.

The closest I did was a gametype mod of UT3 where when you picked up different power ups you changed the mesh into a different creature. The artists where sneaky and used 1 texture for all four creatures, but each UV'd to a different quadrant, so only had to switch the mesh, the texture displayed different for each one.

I'd start by looking and the ammo or gun pickup code, for dropped weapons that give it to the inventory. I haven't done shoulderpads or armor parts so can't say the details on it.

What about for the animations I guess is my biggest concern? Its not too hard to say "Mesh stay here!" but what about having it respond to the bone movements? Is that how the weapon code works?

Im sorry I cant really do research on it right now, Im extremely swamped with work for the next two days with my software engineering class, but the artist really needs direction now to try and meet our timeline for that class.