Easily Customizable Default Human Models

s&box suggestions & feedback
#1

Proposal:

Include in the base game a modular player model that is built to have its gender, skin color, head, hair, shirt, pants, shoes, limbs etc. easily interchangeable.

Benefits
  1. Great compatibility. If you want to add or make dramatic changes to the animation base you won’t break tons of custom content(particularly painful with maps packed with player models).
  1. Saves a lot of data in the long run. Instead of most users downloading an entirely different model just to make a possibly small change you would only need to download a few small parts at most.
  1. Super easy in-depth customization for users and server owners.
    • Install a hundred new heads(that each match a skin color) so that every player that joins your server has a truly unique identity.
    • Any custom cosmetics would generally all fit as they should without implementing features to tweak them.
    • Download a homeless outfit pack so you can mix and match dirty clothing, and even replace a limb so that it’s a stump. Real roleplay potential there.
    • Download a cybernetic pack to replace individual limbs.
    • Download a fitness pack for muscular arms and chests, or shameful beer bellies and triple chins.
    • Imagine most of the player model content you see on the workshop being mixed and matched by anyone without any technical skill required.
    • Put a mask on for a robbery or change your clothing to anything in front of a mirror with hardly any effort from programmers.
    • Attachable horse dildo for other players to adjust to slowly after being hospitalized the first time.
    • Mutant crab man.
  1. Easy bulk work for modellers. For shirts/pants just make a version for one gender and shape it for the other. Hats/glasses can attach themselves to the appropriate attachment ID on the head for example so you don’t have to worry about offsets. Anyone who uses this model system can enjoy your work.
  1. Gore/dismemberment would be much easier and more efficient to implement. Deathmatch modes would be made way more fun just by installing a gore mod for polished results that work for every model.
    In GMod if you want a cop or firefighter model not to look the same you need a different model for every different face and race. People just use the HL2 citizens as a base to save time and effort and it feels cheap.
  1. Wouldn’t stop people from making their own full models that support most of the same cosmetics. They’d have something to base them on so all those attachments are consistent, and have the base animations look right however.

So many servers want player customization, but in GMod mostly all they have is model recoloring and cosmetics that clip unless each is painfully positioned manually for every model. And rips from other games that almost always look jank as fuck. Actually good original stuff is few and far between, and so much of it is obviously based on a HL2/CSS model.

This isn’t GMod. We need something that fills the gap, so why not overhaul the whole player model process with a ton of flexibility and consistency while you’re at it? Let everyone benefit from it and build upon it from the beginning.

Garry’s Mod and S&box(will) allow for an incredible amount of creative freedom for developers and users alike, but let’s not forget that creativity is very iterative. GMod used HL2 and CSS models, and this shaped its custom content in some unfortunate ways.

What will S&box have for its userbase to iterate on when it releases? How easy could it be for them?

Player customization
#2

I don’t think the pill man will stay in the final product since it doesn’t seem to be popular so the second-best option would be Rust’s human players, they have some degree of customization and are ready to use, he did use those for previous non-source 2 versions of s&box.

I’d say we can be very certain that that will be the case.

1 Like
#3

The current Citizens playermodel actually has a bunch of customisation and modularity that hasn’t been shown off in a while. They’ve already got a bunch of clothes and they used to have sexual features. These clothes are added on with attachment points on the avatar, similar to dota2’s cosmetic system. I don’t see why you wouldn’t have it for user-created player models.

One thing I’m waiting for in s&box is a unified player avatar system, considering we can stream in assets during play, you can just choose/make a player model and use it everywhere that has the system (Like gmod’s outfitter)

Edit: @dj-34 has just updated the FAQ with garry’s decision on this:

5 Likes
Ropes, Chains, Tracks and the like
#4

What you are proposing is either not achievable, not something that should be part of the base game or insufficient for the kind of customization people are gonna want to make, depending on how you interpret, IMO.

Making stuff like this work would be a nightmare, people would have to either design body models with extremely similar body proportions or there would have to be a way to properly scale attached stuff to the model, or maybe mark every possible custom content as compatible or incompatible with the head you designed. Neither of these options would be workable for the community as a whole

ex:

how would you go about using crab arms with a sleeved shirt?
What if I want to be a dog instead? yada yada yada…

You could say: “ok, so this will only be for basic human anatomy, using these 2 body types”

Then this will basically only cater to RP and maybe competitive gamemodes, because everyone else would be interested in more customization than that and would not use this system, resorting to something more akin to PAC3 or outfitter.

Standardized attachment points are indeed somewhat of a great idea for simple stuff like hats or backpacks/wings, but it easily breaks due to the sheer variety of stuff people come up with.

This is a great idea for an addon, and will be much more easily implemented in S&Box than it would be in GMod, but I don’t think it should be part of the main game because for it to work it’s scope would have to be reduced in a way that it would only serve a fraction of the community, while hindering efforts to create something more useful because “its not in the standard playermodel customization”