Gear appearance customization

Some people care more about the appearance of their gear than others, but it seems to be fairly popular to be able to modify how you look in these games. There are a couple different methods I've seen used. They've already said they will have dyes in game so I'm not going to touch on coloring.

As mentioned in the dev chat you will likely want to restrict (other than maybe safe area costume items) items to only looking like another of their same general class. So plate armor must look like plate still, longswords can't look like two handers etc.

1) Gear model copying: Lets you make an item look like another item you already have. This might destroy both to combine them into the new item, but you could just allow it to be copied.

2) Wardrobe: You have another equipped item tab (or tabs) that you can put gear in for appearance purposes only and select. Maybe you can only do this in a safe area. This gear will not count for stats or take up space, but you can switch to it for how you look, assuming your actual gear is of the same type.

3) Appearance unlocks: Once you equip a weapon or armor with a new model you unlock that model for cosmetic use. You can select a preferred model for each equipment slot and type. So whenever you have a plate helm equipped it will look like whatever the best looking plate helm you've managed to get so far looks like. You could also have achievements unlock new models as well.

4) Crafter unlocks: Instead of allowing the players to swap models it's up to the crafter to do so. You can make a two handed sword look like any of the two handed swords you can make, independent of stats. Also allow crafters to copy items models to their list of models they can select from for creating new weapons. This could be combined with #1 as well if an appropriately skilled crafter is needed to do the model swapping, this could also be another way they learn new models. The downside is rare models will quickly become common with this method unless only the original item can be learned from.