Skinned Meshes

In additions to managing static meshes through mount points, this asset can also manage skinned meshes in order to clothe your character, add appendages, etc.

One of the advanced features of Mount Points is the ability to apply a ‘Body Skin Mask’ with each skinned mesh. This greatly reduces penetration of the underlying body through the mesh

Using body skin mask, you can create “skin tight” clothing without worrying about the character popping through.

Note: Some solutions use bone manipulations and blend shapes to morph their characters. Most bone manipulations will carry through to the skinned meshes. However, blend shapes do not as those control vertices and not the bones.

Body Skin Renderer

When Mount Points ties the clothing to the body, it needs to look at the bones in the body as well as grab the material being used.

You’ll need to set the SkinnedMeshRenderer used by your character in
the Body Skin Renderer field.

If you leave the field empty, Mount Points will try to find the right
SkinnedMeshRenderer, but if you have multiple ones… there’s no
guarantee it will pick the right one.

Skinned Items

Skinned items can be created at edit-time or run-time.

To create items at edit-time, simply enter the resource path to the mesh and a
resource path to the mask.

When no instance exists, press the blue “+” icon in the skinned item details to
create it or allow it to be created when the game starts using the ‘Instantiate
On Start’ checkbox.

Unity Paths

In order to create objects at run-time, Unity needs your assets in a “Resources” folder. Otherwise, if the asset isn’t referenced in the scene… it won’t be part of your build and the path will fail.

To learn more about Unity’s “Resources” folders, you can read about them here

Skinned Meshes

Skinned meshes are tied to the bones they wrap. That means you can’t simply take a skinned mesh built for one skeleton and use it for another. Since the skin is tied to each bone’s position and rotation, the skin would animate oddly if it were used on a different skeleton.

Ensure your skinned meshes are built for the skeleton you’re wrapping.

To learn more about creating skinned meshes, see the “CustomContent” document found in the Assets/ootii/MountPoints/Extras folder.

Skinned Item Mask

A Skinned Item Mask is a black and white image based on the full body texture of the character you’re attaching the skinned mesh to. When running, the masks will be applied to the diffuse texture in order to turn parts of the character invisible. White areas of the mask allow the diffuse texture to be seen. Black areas turn the corresponding parts of the diffuse texture invisible.

Once you hit play, the mask above will cause the characters legs to become invisible and the skin won’t bleed through the pants.

To use this feature, your skin’s material’s shader needs to support transparencies. I typically set the Rendering Mode to “Cutout”. For some characters like Morph3D and Mixamo, it means changing the shader your skin material uses.