Changing skins In-game

I was wondering if it was at all possible to change a unit's skin when in game.

I know the two basic ways of changing a units appearance are:
-1: Import an alternate model, or
-2: add attachments.

option 1 is nice for things like Arthas trading out his maul for frostmourne, or things such as upgrading a troll to a berserker, but for every change the number of models needed increases exponentially, so anything beyond 1 change really becomes hard to work with.

option 2 is nice for static objects like weapons and shields, but for armor each model almost necessitates their own style of attachments, and to believably change thier armor you would need to add a significant amount of attachment points as well.

If you could change a unit's skin (or change parts of their skin) in game it would add a lot of power to how items could effect characters, and make capes and robes more plausible, as they could be alphaed out in one skin and their in another, allowing them to look more like cloth than a flat board. Anyways, the reason I ask is because the tiles in WC3 seem to change rather dynamically, the ground model can be wrapped however it needs to be, and each ground texture just uses alpha channels to define it's boarders rather than having a specific boarder art for each tile it comes into contact with. Blight can also change tiles in game, and triggers as well. So I was wondering I f a similar thing was even remotely possible in WC3, in the best of circumstances something as powerful as the dynamic skin changes in WoW that each item can cause :)

(trees can change their skin to a blighted version in game as well, as they don't have a separate set of animations for a blighted version)

Even if it is not possible in WC3 I was wondering if there is any information available on changing a model's skin rather than, well option 1 or 2. I'm also working on a stand-alone game based off of the WC3 warlock map, and as a 2D artist (mainly icons and interface stuff) would find any information pertaining to this very helpful :)

Search for DUSC by Toadcop.

Of course you can always make different animations for unit and use some animation tag ( Like Alchemists chemical rage ) to change skin.

edit.

Actually. I think the best way is to just make some naked model and add clothes with attachments. Im no model maker, so I dont know how hard it is to execute, but its ultimatelly the most flexible way to do thing, because you can mix different kind of gears and stuff like that.

I think that Everwood RPG in hive had some screenies about stuff like that.

So yea, Id probably try your option 2.

The attachment way is somewhat bad since attachments only have a birth- (when attaching), stand- (after birth) and deathanimation (when removed). So they do not move with the model, making attaching them extremely difficult.

You would have to make a special model with more attachment points so you could put segments on every limb/etc. Though it might not work too well for an organic model, I've done it with the golem and it is possible.

Oh, that is sick. Exactly what I was looking for :P