alright how do I do animal crossing style facial expressions in a way that lets godot batch a bunch of character renders
do I just have the face be a completely separate mesh
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I don't know whether this is better or worse than just doing each character with a skeleton the normie way
maybe I should do a head shader but I don't know how I'd get the information about which face in there without adding more draw calls
like I don't think you can set CUSTOM1 unless you're manually batching stuff with MultiMesh and if I do that I don't get the benefits of culling
here's Equinox's textures from Warframe mapped onto the mouse
ok I think what I'm gonna do is have facial expressions be a separate mesh
so (relatively) high draw calls for scenes with low numbers of pawns and then it converges to a lower number of draw calls because eventually you've used up all the mesh/material combos
I need to make a list of slots I guess
let's do that right now
- head
- hair
- eyes overlay
- mouth overlay
- torso
- 2 arms
- tail (might need different poses for different kinds of pants)
- 2 legs
and then we'd need separate hair/overlay meshes per head shape and variants of each clothing item for the rest of the body
but if we have multiple head shapes that work with the same body shape or whatever we can share those between them
and once the meshes are done we can put multiple materials on each and use the warframe tint system for color schemes
clothing color scheme per character or clothing color scheme per clothing item?
I'm thinking separate color schemes for hat/top/bottom but combos can be predefined
actually I don't need a separate torso mesh because the shirt mesh can have two materials
maybe pants shouldn't be separate maybe it should just be outfit
my goal is to have it so with a fixed number of character customization options you eventually hit a point where you're no longer adding draw calls to the scene as you add more characters