Hi guy!
So a little back story first, I've been planning out a little game in my head for some time now and over the past month or so I've spent my time toying with different engines and trying different things to see whats going to be the most viable and I think I've almost settled on using Leadwerks as my engine but I'm slightly confused when it comes to how Leadwerks handles animations. I've searched the forums and google and have come across the same bit of information many times (how to deal with animations once they're in the engine) but not much about the before steps.
From what I can tell (and I may be wrong here) Leadwerks requires its animations to be essentially bundled with the mesh model in either single or multi-track animations correct? If this is true then how would a clothing system work? Would I have to animate every single item of clothing and have the engine load up each item's animation tracks separately? I've played with animations in other engines before and they way they handled things is with a weighted and rigged mesh slapped ontop of an armature basically, because they are weight and rigged to the right bones you can just throw a .bvh file at the armature, it moves and the clothing layer over the top moves with it. (This is how SecondLife handles animations, Skyrim and Fallout 3/NV/4 aren't too dissimilar as well.)
Now again I could be completely wrong in all this and there may be a super easy function that I'm missing, I did search around though and found one post which boiled down to "just have all the clothes attached to your character but alpha them out until they are needed" which yeah might work but I was planning for a bit of character customization and if I have to load up every animation in the game for every item of clothing and every npc that might get a little heavy on the load times.
Thanks in advance and sorry if I'm being a massive idiot
Jeni
