Best practice with cloning a character with different variations of clothing

[Joe_Kerr]

@Kite

2 Since the armor/weapon/or whatever it may be is a different mesh from the character mesh and I am now cloning/instantiating them, will I have to use play() on each mesh (combined to create the one character) to play a single animation in sync with the character mesh (all meshes use the same armature and have the same animations in the glb file). I can’t help but think this will affect performance especially if I’m hoping to clone/instantiate tons of characters.

If you use palette textures or use small enough painted textures that can fit into an atlas, you can as well merge all meshes into one. (1 draw call!) Not sure about performance when dynamically changing equpiment (instead of once at startup).

Also beware: do make stress tests. Can you get high enough FPS with the max number of characters? If not, you might need VATs.

@Kite

1 What would the best way/practice to do this be?

I have used this as a baseline: Loading character with animations to scene and cloning it with animation groups - #9 by Panuchka