Just to clarify my stance: I'm not saying I'm not doing that already. I do! But only because I have no other choice.
Keep in mind that there are things that are not so easily adjusted just with bones. Some fine tuning is required for things like a... woman body.
Moreover, there are times when I pose a character in the first frame of an animation, and when I show it to my artist, he asks me to deform several meshes so the body curves are more realistic.
Just imagine trying to do that with just bones... it's just not possible.
So my workflow is indeed like you say, pag, but every time I deform an underlying body part I also need to reduplicate all clothes meshes to update their keys.
Far from efficient... ;-P
Ok, sorry for necroing this... but the fact that 2.5 years have passed and we still have this limitation is getting on my nerves.
I know you guys have a lot of work, and you're the developers and have the right to establish what your priorities are... but still, let me give you a graphical example.
This is one of my models for a new game...:
To not complicate the post too much, let's say the legs have three parts...: foot, shin, and thigh.
I'm using mix'n'match to separate the body by skin tones. This is the "fair" skin tone.
Then you can have a myriad of socks. I've just started to add them, so there's only three there, but I plan to have 5-8 types with multiple colors each.
Now... when I said in previous posts "I need skin-tight clothing follow exactly the body parts underneath", now you'll see with this model that I wasn't exaggerating, right? I mean, this is not your typical platformer character. This is going to be zoomed in to an absurd level and it really needs to look good.
So, when I started to use Spine three years ago, I thought... "Well, so let's use linked meshes and give the tight-fitting clothes the same mesh as the body part they're on..." And yes, that works well... until you need to put that clothing on another slot.
Then you only have the option to duplicate, losing any future adjustment you make on the master mesh.
"But why is that a big deal? Any decent animator will just use weighted bones, you stupid amateur, har har!"
Yeah, and that's what I'm doing now because I've learned a lot since I started this post.
But... you change the weights of the original mesh, and you need to recreate it on the duplicated slot master mesh. You add, move, delete a vertex...: same. Any little, tiny, minuscule change you make... no longer identical, so I'll have a thigh flexing X, and a sock flexing X minus 10.
And yes, you can re-dup, deleting the master mesh in the duped slot, and recreate AAAAALL the slaves and put them again in their skin placeholders.
Do that with 50 skins... I dare you.
So, what will I need to do from a realistic perspective? I either try not the change anything in those body parts for the 3-4 years of development this will take...
...or multiply those 50 types of socks by the 3 skintones we will have. That is, merging each sock type, color and skintone for that thigh, every possible combination... and do that for the other thigh and any other body part that could have skin and cloth at the same time, and needs to move the same exact way.
Now... seriously... just having 3 skins for the body and whatever skins for the clothes, and activate the body skin, then the clothing on top... wouldn't that be so much more easier?
In fact, that hell of unending combos would also translate into Unity when coding!
What is easier to code?
a) Activate fair skin; activate black high socks
...or b) Activate fair skin, search (somehow) which is the name for the skin that has the black high socks over the fair skin
So please, by the gods, recover this as a reasonable feature to research into.
I mean, if this makes my computer explode, so be it. It could be optional, you know. Put a checkbox or something on the Settings, but for the love of god, why is this impossible to do?
Anyway, thanks for reading yet another wall of frustrated text.
