My players have bodies now. And kits. And the kit colour is not something I picked: it is pulled straight from the club's colour in my database. Change the club, the shirts change.
The build is layered. An invisible mannequin skeleton drives the bones, because every animation I own lives on it and touching it breaks the game. A MetaHuman face, MetaHuman arms and legs, and a shirt and shorts hang off it. Everything you see is MetaHuman. The mannequin is a puppeteer nobody watches.
My first attempt put the kit on the mannequin. His chest punched straight through the shirt. The fix was a realisation, not a hack: MetaHuman deletes the body geometry that sits under clothing. The arms, the legs and the outfit are made for each other. I was dressing the wrong body. Hide the mannequin, use MetaHuman's own limbs, and the clipping is gone. Instantly. The right architecture makes bugs disappear rather than fixing them.
Then the fun part. Team colour from the club record. Opponent in theirs. And the goalkeeper in something that must clash with both, which is not my preference, it is Law 4 of the Laws of the Game. Zero per-player setup: spawn a footballer, tag him with a team, and he turns up in the right shirt. That is the whole point of building data-first. The game gets more real without me touching it.
Also shipped: a proper broadcast scoreboard. BKU 1 - 0 NHU, club codes straight from the database too.
Shipped: layered character stack · club kits from the database · broadcast scoreboard