How dumb/impractical would this be?

I have a whole-body character mesh I'm exporting to a game engine. This character can have different equipment/armor worn over the body mesh. In order to prevent skin clipping I just export versions of the whole-body mesh with certain chunks of the body deleted. Basically each armor piece gets a custom body model to go with it. Standard paper doll workflow.

I wanted to instead generate a "mask" texture that would be placed in the skin shader to just mask out any sections of the skin that are supposed to be covered. Rather than deleting vertices I'm just not rendering portions of the skin.

Is this something worth perusing or does nobody do this for a reason?