Should a first person character necessarily use multiple meshes?

Hello,

So I have been looking through the First Person Shooter example, and they use a separate mesh for the first person and third person view. I am sure everyone has seen what I am talking about, with setting the first person mesh to visible only to the local player, while the third person mesh is visible only to everyone else etc. For my character I want it to be semi-realistic so you can see the legs and arms will be at the side for most of the game unless the character is doing something in particular. So I am wondering if this is the best thing to do. Obviously the camera would not want to see half way through the persons head, so how else should i do this? Can I just set certain bones to be not visible?

Thank you,

You can have a separate head mesh, and under the “rendering” section, you check the visibility of it to “Owner no see”. This will prevent players from seeing the innards of their head mesh, but other players will see a head when they look at the player. You’ll probably want to do something fancy for when a player pitches their head to look all the way down so that the camera doesn’t clip the inside of the body mesh.

Is there a way I could just use one mesh? It seems inefficient to use/animate/move multiple meshes even if the second mesh is only the head