15/08 Devlog Update - CAW
Added 2021-08-15 04:05:15 +0000 UTCA CAW system is something that I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to implement, and if it was, I didn't expect it to be this early in development. But it's happening mostly out of convinience for myself as a developer. When I started creating clothing meshes inside Blender and importing them into Unreal, there were occasions where I wanted to change my character's outfit for testing purposes. I was creating full ring gear like tops, elbow pads, knee pads, boots etc. But it occured that I had to import all the gear collectively which was inconvinient as if I only wanted to check one portion of clothing.
So then I did some research and found out through Unreal's documentation: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/AnimatingObjects/SkeletalMeshAnimation/WorkingwithModularCharacters/ it's much more efficient to separate each body part up and then re-combine them.
I'm taking the character meshes and saving them into structs mainly because there's a lot more information to draw from when trying to accessskeletal mesh components, like which character it belongs to, and which outfit it belongs to. Also, when navigating the customization menu, the system is set up whereby if an option is floated upon, the 'preview' mesh is updated. Except there isn't really a 'preview mesh', there's just one skeletal mesh that's constantly being altered. So there needs to be 'saved' mesh and an 'actual' mesh, which is exactly where the strcuts come in very useful.
So again, the idea is just to split all the meshes up in Blender, and then combine them in Unreal. 'm planning on adding more content always. Thnaks for reading!
