Clothes Replacing Mesh

[Sothh]

Something I have been thinking of: if clothes are covering a models mesh, there is no need for that part of the mesh to even exist. Removing parts of the mesh that are covered would also fix the problem of skin showing through the clothes, and would make the model much more optimized for game use.

[Manuel]

Thanks!
These days we are just talking about this idea...

[Sothh]

Also, clothes should be attached to the armature, and not the actual mesh. This would make creating clothing easier, and there would be no need to create special vertex groups to match to mesh.

[ThomasL]

Clothes are attached to the armature when exported. Anything else would be prohibitively expensive. However, the rest position is defined by the mesh. It is somewhat like modelling the clothing by giving it a shrinkwrap modifier and then applying it.

It is easy enough to removed hidden verts in Blender. If you know that your character will always be wearing the same set of clothes, that is the way to go.

[duststorm]

I'm also looking for a good workflow in blender to temporarily hide some parts of the MH basemesh that are hidden by clothes.
Both to make a render, but also to export a game-ready model (that preferably has no gaps).

I want to keep the original MH mesh intact so I can add new clothes that cover more or less skin (like a swimsuit or shorts instead of long trousers).

At the moment I haven't found the ideal solution yet. I'm creating my clothes on separate layers and duplicate the meshes I will be modifying to a new layer. Finished characters can be exported to a separate blend file. If the armature remains in one blend file and is referenced by the others you can share the same animation library for all the created characters.