2D Clothing Items

[Majicpanda]

http://postimg.org/image/jxgjma859/

Is there any better way to either design the art or inform my artists of a way I can "equip" clothing items onto players? The idea is the items need to fix the white area pixel perfect, but currently they are tasked with creating a whole new sprite for every single size of character in the game, so all art is duplicated 5 times so far for chest and head items.

[Majicpanda]

This was probably poorly worded, sorry.

Aside from the 3d method to create a model for my characters and then wrap a material around the characters "chest" item, is there any tk2d way to pull this kind of thing off?  If you have a Human, Giant, Gnome, etc all needing to equip "Platemail Chest" item, currently I'm having to make a new Platemail Chest sprite for every single race in my game.. does this sound incorrect?

[unikronsoftware]

Can't you just have a plate mail chest sprite as a child of the main sprite?

[Majicpanda]

I do currently have a parent child object like below..

GameObject (Player)
- Main Character Sprite (Race, human, elf etc Z = 0)
- Chest Sprite (simply stacks on top Z = -.1)
- Helm Sprite (also just stacks on top Z = -.2)
- Weapon Sprite (dynamically equipped Z = .1)

So when I call EquipItem(Item item) in my game it simply changes the right sprite SetSprite("Plate Helm") etc ... not sure what you mean by child?

The problem is a plate chest for an ogre is much larger than a plate chest for a halfling, so it doesn't scale well.  I'm assuming in 3d you use the same "chainmail" material and just stretch it across a model, but working with sprites is very different.

[unikronsoftware]

I don't think there is a solution to this apart from drawing the variants...

[Majicpanda]

Ok thanks just making sure before I have my artist draw every single helmet and chest item 6 times each... the variant will just be moving some pixels around, but it is still quite a bit of art when you have 50 head items, 50 chest items x 6 race sizes. 

I assumed no solution but the verification from you is all I needed to feel good about the project, lol.