Skinobject

Skinobject is a data structure used in software and game development to describe the visual appearance of an entity. It acts as a portable container for resources and parameters that drive rendering, allowing skins to be swapped or layered without changing geometry. Common use cases include character customization, user interface theming, and runtime appearance changes for models or objects in a scene.

Typically a skinobject includes an identifier, a display name, and mappings from material slots to texture resources such as diffuse, normal, metallic, roughness, and emissive maps. It may also store color tints, opacity, and per-material shader parameter overrides, along with references to meshes or sub-meshes that the skin should affect. Additional data can cover lightmap indices, render order, and layering information used to compose multiple skins.

In practice, skinobjects are serialized in formats like JSON, XML, YAML, or custom binary forms. A skin pack may contain multiple skinobjects that can be loaded at startup or on demand, enabling themes or user-selected appearances. At runtime, a skinobject is applied by binding its texture resources to the corresponding material slots of the target model and applying any shader overrides; layering can allow base skins to be augmented by overlays.

Design considerations include performance and memory usage, caching skin objects to reduce texture loads, and ensuring compatibility across engine versions. Versioning and asset pipelines help manage updates and licensing for skin packs.