Question

I have an animated character swc that is an empty skeleton basically (has all the body parts, animations, and functions/vars). I want to essentially put different clothes on that character at runtime so I don’t have to have many copies of this character in my resources.

For example, I have ‘skeleton’ (the non-clothed model) and ‘Bob’, ‘Jane’, and ‘Mary’ characters. ‘skeleton’ is animated and fully works as an exported swc, and to get the other characters in their clothes/skins, I open up Flash CS5 and replace the movie clips with the ‘clothed’ versions of the components. To clarify,’skeleton’ has “body parts” as movie clips that are all animated on the timeline, such as “head”,”face”,”left arm”,”right arm”, etc. I open up ‘Bob’, who has the same exact design as ‘skeleton’, with the exception that ‘Bob’ has all the clothes and such as differently-designed movie clips. The size, shape, orientation, and reg points are all the same across all the components. After I’ve replaced all the movie clips in ‘skeleton’, I export it as a swc named ‘Bob.swc’ and I do this for all the characters.

What I’m asking is, how can I do this process ^, but at runtime instead, so I don’t have all these duplicate root swcs (‘skeleton’ has a lot of frames on it) so I can cut down on a bunch of space? So I can do something like:

// bob gets all the actions and animations  of skeleton
var bob:UIMovieClip = new skeleton() 
// replace the body movieclip with a new looking one
bob.body = resources.bodyassets['bob']['body'] 

Or something similar to that?

Answer 1

Would adding the skin parts as children of your skeleton parts work ?
Could you have ‘guide’ movie clip inside each body part which helps you animate
then another empty movie clip sibling to the ‘guide’, inside body where you’ll add the skin ?
If you add the skin inside the animated body part it should copy it’s transforms(position/rotation/scale).
something like :

    var bob:UIMovieClip = new skeleton() 
    bob.body.skin.addChild(resources.bodyassets['bob']['body']);
    bob.body.guide.visible = false;

if the bob.body contains shapes, or a single movieclip, you should be able to something like:

var bob:UIMovieClip = new skeleton();
bob.body.addChild(resources.bodyassets['bob']['body']);//add skin for body
bob.body.graphics.clear();//clear existing template/helper graphics
//or, depdening on the case
bob.body.removeChildAt(0);

HTH