Modular Armor Baker

STOP RE-RIGGING YOUR ARMOR.

You've got a beautiful dress, a sleek breastplate, or a full-body suit — and

three characters who all need to wear it. Different skeleton names. Similar

proportions. Different rigs. Normally you'd be staring down hours of work in

your DCC tool, bone-mapping by hand and hoping the weights survive the export.

Modular Armor Baker fixes that.

Bake your armor or clothing once, directly inside Unity, and get a prefab you

can drop onto any compatible character — right now, at runtime — with full

skeletal binding, perfect deformation, and zero clipping artifacts. No

re-rigging. No re-exporting. No guesswork.

► HOW IT WORKS

Open the baker from Tools > Shadowed Souls > Modular Armor Baker. Drag in your

source character, toggle the meshes you want to bake, choose your output folder,

and click Bake. The tool produces:

• A mesh data asset — a compact ScriptableObject capturing mesh snapshots,

bone weights, and blend shape data.

• A ready-to-use prefab — drop it onto any character in the Hierarchy.

► WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DROP THE PREFAB

Modular Armor Bake handles everything automatically upon scene load:

✓ Discovers the character skeleton up the hierarchy — no setup required.

✓ Remaps bones intelligently, with built-in support for both UE4 and UE5

naming conventions right out of the box.

✓ Spawns depth-corrected sibling renderers that use a custom stencil pipeline

to guarantee armor always sits cleanly on top of the body — no Z-fighting,

no flickering skin pixels bleeding through a dress.

✓ Synchronizes blend shapes every frame so the armor breathes, flexes, and

deforms perfectly in sync with the body underneath.

✓ Cleans up everything if the prefab is removed or the character is

despawned — no leaking renderers, no orphaned materials.

► THE HEADACHE IT SOLVES

Indie games often ship with multiple body types, faction variants, or

customization systems. Getting one artist-authored outfit to work across all of

them is normally a per-character, per-outfit manual process. Multiplied across a

full game's wardrobe, that's hundreds of hours of rigging, testing, and patching.

Modular Armor Baker turns that into: bake once, drop anywhere.

Whether you're building a character customization screen, an in-world loot

system, or a demo that needs a quick costume swap — your artists create the

outfit, you bake it, your designers drop it. Everyone goes home on time.

► KEY FEATURES

• One-click baking — full pipeline inside the Unity Editor, no external tools

• Drop-prefab runtime binding — works at edit time and play time

• Cross-skeleton compatibility — automatic UE4/UE5 bone name remapping

• Depth-correct stencil pipeline — body never bleeds through clothing

• Live clipping controls — per-piece inflate sliders and body shrink adjust fit without re-baking

• Blend shape synchronization — deformation stays perfectly in sync

• Multiple mesh support — bake full outfit sets as a single prefab

• Fully URP compatible — tested on Unity 6.3 LTS (Forward, Forward+, Deferred, Deferred+)

• Clean teardown — no memory leaks, no renderer orphans

► REQUIREMENTS

• Unity 6.3 LTS or later

• Universal Render Pipeline (URP)

• Source characters sharing compatible skeleton structure

(UE4 and UE5 naming conventions are automatically resolved)

► QUICK SETUP (two steps total)

1. Add the Armor Stencil Feature to your URP Renderer(s) and assign the

included ArmorClipMask material and ArmorComformComputeShader compute shader. Takes about 30 seconds.

2. Open the baker, bake your outfit, drop the prefab on your character.

That's it! You're done and your character is ready to strut their new digs!