NPC Appearance System
Features
Highly Customizable
Scalable and Adaptive
Very Performant
System Overview
Using the Mutable Plugin and its extension plugin, Populations, the NPC Appearance System I developed in Cure allows designers and artists to easily add new appearance options and styles and create constraint presets to control which options can be paired together when generating NPC models - all without requiring engineers to modify the system code to adapt to any changes.
Feature Details
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Pairing Mutable with its extension plugin, Populations, grants designers the ability to define presets of constraints on top of the standard parameter options. See Player Customization System for more details on how I used the base Mutable plugin.
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By implementing the NPC appearance generation through the Mutable plugin, I gain many performance benefits. Mutable generates meshes on background worker threads asynchronously ensuring the main game thread does not hitch during the mesh creation. It also combines meshes into a single mesh reducing draw calls significantly per character and it can reduce the material count improving GPU performance.
