It really depends on how you prefer to structure your project. If by "plain character" you mean a character without any equipment, you could render each item separately without the body. In your project, you would then layer the equipment on top of the character. This way, each piece of gear is its own layer, allowing you to assemble and manage them individually at runtime. Or if you rather switch the whole character and avoid layers, you could just render out the whole character with differet gear loadouts like you said. I do now have a discord at the moment.