(The Problem with TU’s current rig and setup)
TU’s player model is very basic and very bland, the player models have to conform to the rig and it’s clunkiness, It would be nice to have something more along the lines of what Gmod has or at least a few other options to the rig, I work with making 3D models and I’m practicing rigging and animating, the 1 thing that is a nightmare as well as a disappointment is the very very limited rig, the very stiff animations is one thing but the rig not giving player flexibility is another, the animations can be changed down the line to a more smoother one easily as well as not having effect on much, but the player model rig limits uses and what they can do which the longer it stays limited with this really limited rig the more players make models with it.
(What TU should do to make, making player models better for the community)
I think the rig should have an update to it with letting players do a bit more, I’m not 100% sure how Gmod does it but from what it looks like it uses a common rig that lets people add extra, for example in Gmod you can have tail bones, breast bones, hair bones and so on, it would be great if TU let us do the same, people would be able to add bones and physics to their player model so they can look a little less unsettling, it would let players express themselves more with those that want tails, to have them move about and sway side to side like a real tail instead of being this stiff object protruding out their body, characters could add Jiggle physics to hair so long hair can move like it should, they could add it to capes and clothing to get a natural movement and of course they could add it to Breasts, Butts, Big characters belly’s and so on, just giving the player base the opportunity to add to the rig would be nice and go a long way for people in making what they want, funny character models can have wavy heads that flop about. I feel a lot of people would love to have the same feature that Gmod does because who wouldn’t.
(The problems that could come from this feature)
The problems I could see with this is players having scuffed hit boxes in mini games but that isn’t really a problem due to games like Lazer Tag forces you to play as the ugly fuse models.
Another would be making sure physics objects don’t bug out, say a character has a tail and it’s collision gets caught on something, it then starts to freak out and go crazy, but that could be solved by making sure the physics don’t have collision with anything that isn’t the player model it’s self.
Cosmetics not working on models, this could be solved with disabling the option on models that use the new rig or having a feature that lets players set where the cosmetics would go on the rig themselves like how you can now.
One other I can think of is if there are to many physics objects in an area it could cause chugging for the game or low end PC players, TU sadly isn’t on UE5 and I don’t know if the devs plan to port it over at some point since UE5 can help with playing high end stuff on low end PC’s which would do this game wonders but that’s something else and I don’t think that would fix the Physics problem, the only thing I can think of is having a setting for players to disable Physics on their end, if that is even possible.
(End thoughts)
I mostly work with Blender and worked with UE4 and Unity in a games design course but I wasn’t good with that stuff and don’t fully know much with the engines, so maybe there’s some stuff to this I don’t know about that could cause problems and can’t be easily solved, but that’s game dev for you, there will always be problems and you will always need to find a way to fix it or compromise. Overall if TU can give players a lot more freedom with the player models and make it so content creators can do more then it will massively benefit the game, I think TU has needed something like this for the longest time now and it would be nice to see a lot of this game get polished up at some point with better rigs and freedom with them, better smoother animations and so on, but one step at a time and I think this would be a good step to take, specially since the longer it takes the more there will be a huge wof of old models with the old rig, not saying to remove the old rig as it would break all the old models people made, but to add a new one that players can freely add jiggle bones to, again something like how Gmod lets players have physics on anything and or be 4 legged creatures.