Basically, I have a monster, and i would like the user to be able to swap out the head, and maybe the legs, but not the whole monsters body. (like borderlands where you can swap the head only) They can exchange body parts in real time.

I have no idea what a good approach to this might be. My first thought is to have sets of various body parts, and attach them programatically, so that the user can swap them out. I assume the attachment areas would need to be the same dimensions. The things I’m worried about would be animation, and how to programmatically do the attaching. I would hope that I could somehow specify attachment locations in a 3d modeler, read in that info when loading the model, and then join the parts. I suppose I could then tell each body part to animate separately, but once I join them I don’t think that would be possible anymore. Any ideas?

What i can say is that GTA SA used a dummy objects system for each swappable component of cars.
So for a head you should put a dummy “empty” object located at the height of the borders of neck, then set the pivot of the head at the bottom of the head and than programmatically set the coordinates of the head to the dummy object position.
Regarding the animation i can’t be of help.

Last time I looked at this I managed to get objects to follow other objects within a pre-defined bone structure.
http://videometry.blogspot.dk/2011/05/mocap-to-molehill-via-3d-studio-max-and.html

You should check out SEA3D if you’ve got access to 3D Studio MAX. They seem to have mastered this. Having a decent workflow for exporting animation is a must. MD5 was always a bit flakey.

Good Luck!

SEA3D looks very cool, and I would probably use that. Though, I don’t know how it would help with the animation/part swapping aspect of what I’m trying to accomplish.

Someone wrote this to me “it’s really not that complicated if you know your 3D algorithms. Animation is mostly armature/skeleton based nowadays which means that you just need to bind the meshes to the same bones/armature. The same weights/positions are only required at the attaching vertices. Even there you can adapt the position of the connecting vertices by using morph targets/shape keys if you think it’s worth the overhead (it’s probably not).”

But I don’t know if this applies to Away3D, and I only have a vague idea of what they’re talking about. Do they mean I can animate the character as a whole, and still swap out body parts in real time so long as the bones/armature at the connecting points are the same? If so, is this something that is possible in Away3D?