Best Workflow Practice for Creating Multiple Skins for Characters

I’m working on creating a low-poly game character in Blender, and exported for use in a game engine. This character has many “skins” available for it - actually they’re not really skins, since the mesh obviously changes a lot here. But they’re all supposed to have the same actions and everything.


My question is, what’s the most efficient way to go about creating all these variations for my character? For example, there’s 2 methods I thought of, e.g.

  1. Make a swimsuit/nude model that model clothes onto it?
  2. Or, just make each model directly. Everytime I start a new skin I keep just the head and hands and delete the rest of the mesh.

Which one is better? Or is there a better way to do this kind of thing?

PS: I already made 1 skin, but to avoid complicating things, let’s assume at this point I haven’t started modelling anything yet.