One of the main issues for making new races is fitting all the armor on to them. This is the main reason why dracthyr only have shoulders and why demon hunter forms only have weapons.
I think there is a clever technical solution to speeding this process up by 10x or more.
The Universal Armor Model:
So every new armor model is created to fit the Universal Armor Rig and that gets converted into the character rig automatically.
Shoulder model → Universal Shoulder Rig → Character rig.
How?
Every character has separate body dimensions.
The Universal Model, needs to be fit into each character model - once.
The adjustment perimeters are stored.
That now becomes the default adjustment frame for that character-bodytype.
Kind of like placing the same texture on a cube or a ball, but instead you are now placing a 3d model on to different rigs.
First of all, armor in wow is mostly textures. Majorty of armor sets contains up to 4 models attached to the character: Left Shoulder, Right Shoulder, Belt Buckle and Helmet. Out of those only Helmets are actually adjusted to fit different heads. Shoulders and buckles are just attached to special attachment points that are just bones with set scaling so the model scales with character.
This is why they are visible on Dracthyrs because they are universal. Some items are custom back pieces but they work just like shoulders and buckle, just a 3d model attached, no adjusting needed. It’s not visible on dracthyr because it would clip with with wings too much. As for rest of the armor parts, they aren’t visible because they all heavely rely on textures and they chose not use standard layout for textures that all playable characters use that all armor textures are designed to layer on top of it. It has nothing to do with adjusting armor, textures can stretch over any surface.
Starting with Legion, some armor sets have more 3d elements using what is called a collection. This is a basicly collection of various elements attached that gets attached to player rig directly by just vertices being affected by specific bones in the model. This allows those to follow all player animations and deform with player movement instead of just being rigid 3d models attached.
Those things need to be adjusted to every player model just like helmets. They already stated that they use automated tools to adjust helmets few years ago. It is likely they do autometed tools for collections, especially given that all they need to do is to match bones which use the same labels and just deform model to basic A or T pose.
They have actually said that they are exploring AI tools to do that as the a big chunk of gear still requires custom fittings. Especially helms, 3d modeled shoes and 3d gloves.
Having built AI tools before, I can say that leaning towards AI trying to do the fitting is likely to be a dumb direction as it is a massive amount of development with unreliable results which would still need human intervention most of the time.
This is why I made the post.
Looking at what the results are… they don’t yet have a good system.