Original Post
What I'm wondering about is how to go about model sub-loading in both the art department and actual programming department. What I mean by model sub-loading(I mean loading not Lod-ing) is like morrowind, neverwinter nights or more specfically fable. When you put armor on your character there is a model that is sub-loaded over the original mesh. Like how you sub-load a texture over another texture but with models. My theory is from looking at the customizable tatoo templates is that the model is cut into different submodels that are then animated by the skeleton and that the body parts are bound to the skeleton at different nodes.(or they could just be using multiple texture maps *G*) So to subload you would just replace the original mesh with your armor or whatever. this would nescesitate(sp?) modeling the model and seperating it into parts, neh? Anyhow what are some ideas on the best way to do this? It seems to me that just rendering another model over a base mesh is wasteful because the hidden vertices still have to be processed for animation even if they aren't rendered. So any suggestions? (Yea, I don't have any code, I'm looking for theory here because before I start to code I'm gonna do some art and I don't want to have to go and redo said art. *G*)