Original Post
I am used to coding one model for a player with perhaps different textures for skins. I am trying to expand my skills in this regard, specifically towards modeling aditional meshes on top of base meshes to represent equipment the player is wearing. I don't want to go down the road of a model for every variation. That gives me brain freeze and makes my mouse shake. :) Even if it's easier to code. So can anyone give me some direction in this? How can I tell my player model to also model a helmet mesh over the head? Then there's the issue of animation. I could read the models 'head' transformation matrix and apply that matrix also to the helmet to get it in the right place. Seems clunky..:/ And what's the best data structure relationship to use for this sort of thing? My object class currently stores a pointer to an asset that contains the base player mesh, textures, ect. to avoid duplication of resources and take advantage of instancing on the GPU. I could add another asset pointer to my object class for the helmet I suppose. Thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks.