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copied!<p>The model system is quite complex, there is really no one answer. They use a mix of techniques and have to balance poly count and texture size to keep the content size and target machine performance somewhere in the realm of reasonable.</p> <p>A few places to get started:</p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPQ" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPQ</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.zezula.net/en/mpq/stormlib.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.zezula.net/en/mpq/stormlib.html</a></p> <p><a href="http://wowmapview.sourceforge.net/wowmodelview" rel="nofollow">http://wowmapview.sourceforge.net/wowmodelview</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.wowmodelviewer.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wowmodelviewer.org/</a></p> <p>Dig around, maybe use some of the tools, try to find the places people have tried to document the formats. That's the best way, other than watching the game carefully and critically. Also go read about modern modeling techniques, let you head explode a little, then it will all start to sink in. </p> <ul> <li>Keep in mind the EULA and legalities concerning using any wow content outside of using the game, and especially with regards to sharing any blizzard developed or distributed files, packs, or content of any kind.</li> </ul> <p>If you look at the MPQ content, you can see the models, and the textures used. These will give you a really good idea about whats going on. And even when playing the game, if you stop and think about what you see, like how the base models remain unchanged when you swap the equipment. And how each equip piece seems to have its own matched texture (multiples really) and you can begin to get an idea how they basic texture - poly mesh system works. You will also have to keep in mind that different video settings may have very different pipes (the chain of setup and rendering events) and may work differently relative to your original question. </p> <p>There is probably very little wow-side software texture blending/compositing in normal modes as, for one, the matrix of combinations of even the number of classes and races per piece would have a huge number of "compiled" textures to track and store. Most things would be blended/mapped with the hardware in most modes. Also keep in mind there are a ton of other things going on, like lighting, environment mapping, shaders and friends...</p> <p>3D modeling has become a very complex subject. Generally however you can think in terms of the pipe, and the source material. In many cases in wow the base mesh is doing much of the work of the illusion, and its not a big deal anymore to have extra polly's defined separately and procedurally "affixed" to the base model at run time (like the wide part of a glove around a forearm, and as opposed to the old static keyframe mesh compositing). If you watch closely you can see the devs and the artists reusing the base models every chance they get or can, and creatively use textures on what otherwise would look like a naked body. There is extra info buried in the "item" and its associated content describing what needs to happen for the illusion (some cases its buried hard coded in the game and scripts). Sometimes a base vertex(es) are jsut extruded, sometimes there is only a texture, sometiems a seperate mesh.</p> <p>Edit:</p> <p>I really didnt answer the part about "seemless" meshes and lack of armor "buildup". A very general term and technique for general cases is "culling" or the scooping away of unnessary geometry. The honest and streight forward answer is that this is, in the modern world, a joint effort by the devs and the artists, as well as what I'll call the "script" writers, both of world scripts and meterial scripts and code. Good dynamic-model graphics have a plan and an architecture for dealing wiht all these issues and the ones the OP mentioned (and a great deal of the look of the game is decided, esp with WoW, with these common issues in mind). So it really depends on the skill and understanding of the artists and the design of the engine, but never is really done as an absolute code driven all-in-one solution. As an example of a common tactic with a simplistic system, If an artist defines an "end cap", of the wide part of the glove to have a sort of "bleed" area into the assumed arm or bracer, then they have the ability to make the glove work with anything that might be on the arm, so long as there is nothing that might poke through the flanging arm part of the glove. Many ways to go from there, but at this point even a generalized visibility culling step, pre-world transform, with no knowedge of the world enviroment or avatar state at all, could cull the unseen polly's. You could then cache and reuse that flavor of the model for a while. When you know your own arch and systems, you can do much better than this simplistic example. But, the important thing is that the artist knew that would happen since the end of the glove is sealed, and knew they were maintaining the games scalability budget. So this is a little closer to the OPs question about dealing with mutiple sets of overlapping gemoetry decided at run time.</p> <p>The artist/modeler may also just decide to not do anything about it, and put no end cap because they understand the the viewing angle of seeing up the glove is rare-ish and not that many polly's, and/or more expensive. If you look at the shoulder and collar designs of the more elaborate gear, you can really begin to see the mix of art and engineering sometng like WoW goes through. Many of the collars are flat, just simple flat meshes with a texture on each side, possibly the same texture.</p>

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