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Common Workflows

Practical step-by-step guides for the most common use cases.

First-Person Body Setup

Generate a headless body mesh for a first-person game where the camera would clip through the character's head.

  1. Open Tools → Skinned Mesh Separator
  2. Assign the full-body SkinnedMeshRenderer
  3. Click 🔍 Auto-Find Bones (or assign the Head bone manually)
  4. Ensure Include Child Bones is enabled (to capture jaw, eyes, etc.)
  5. Click Remove Head (Keep Body & Arms)
  6. Save the mesh as Character_BodyNoHead
  7. Assign Character_BodyNoHead to the SkinnedMeshRenderer used in your first-person camera setup

The body will animate correctly on the original skeleton without rendering a head in the player's view.

Modular Character System

Create separate mesh assets per body region for a character customisation system where players can swap body parts or hide regions under clothing.

  1. Run the tool multiple times on the same source SkinnedMeshRenderer:
    • Keep ONLY Head → Character_Head
    • Remove Head → Character_Body
    • Keep ONLY Arms → Character_Arms
  2. Assign each mesh to its own SkinnedMeshRenderer, all sharing the same skeleton/rig
  3. Toggle SkinnedMeshRenderer.enabled at runtime to show/hide each region

Tip

This approach avoids duplicate animated characters — all SkinnedMeshRenderers can share the same Animator and bone hierarchy.

Extracting a Custom Body Region

Use the Other Bone field to extract any part of the mesh — a leg, a tail, a backpack, or any accessory.

  1. In the Other Bone field, drag the root bone of the region you want (e.g. the Thigh_L bone for the left leg)
  2. Enable Include Child Bones to capture the full leg (shin, foot, toes)
  3. Click Keep ONLY Other Part or Remove Other Part depending on what you need
  4. Save the result

LOD Mesh Generation

Reduce draw call complexity by creating a simplified lower-body or upper-body mesh for distant LOD levels.

  1. Extract the lower body using the Other Bone field (assign Hips or Spine as the root)
  2. After saving, import the mesh back and apply a Unity Mesh Simplifier or similar to reduce poly count
  3. Assign the simplified mesh as a lower LOD level in a LODGroup component

Gameplay Dismemberment Setup

Pre-separate body parts for a damage system where arms, legs, or the head can detach.

  1. Extract each body region as a separate mesh asset (Head, Arms, LeftLeg, RightLeg, Torso)
  2. At runtime, disable the original SkinnedMeshRenderer on hit
  3. Spawn the appropriate pre-extracted mesh as a MeshRenderer (no longer needing to be skinned) with physics applied

Editor-only tool

Skinned Mesh Separator runs in the Unity Editor only. The mesh splitting happens at author time — the extracted .asset files are what you use at runtime. See Limitations for details.