Creating an animation in Unreal. Clothing, Exporting, ect questions

I am crazy new to this pipeline. I’ve decided to use UE4 rather than rendering out due to a lack of money for a good renderer and a lack of good hardware to drive it. And I’m already very familiar with UE4 (:

I haven’t watched the sequencer videos yet but I’m about to. I’ve been learning just about everything in one week. Rigging, Texturing, Sculpting, retopo, ect. (Pluralsight) but am only just nearly finished on my sculpt of one of the characters I’m using.

  1. I’m considering skipping traditional retopo (where you recreate the entire model in a package like modo or maya) and just getting the sculpts down to about 3 - 15k polys using the tools in Zbrush. How important is performance ingame for this? Can sequencer “render out” frames by just running it slower or whatever?

  2. Is there an established workflow for quickly iterating on animations this way? I doubt that I’ll be able to get my animation to play out as expected the first time around and being able to quickly visualize and alter what I’m animating is huge as far as time-sinks go.

  3. I want to swap out the clothing of my models (more like my models are naked and I want to add clothes on modularly) without having to re-rig my models every time. I’m using Modo so resources are far more scarce than Maya. I’ve heard things from the Maya community about using deformers, parenting the cloth to the same skeleton, ect. but as Maya was completely alien to me and their explanations were very specific to the tools and methods unique to that software I’m a tad overwhelmed, especially when I also don’t know how much of this will work when exported to Unreal (assumption being that much of it is only usable if you’re rendering out in the animation package). At this moment my assumption is that I make 2 static meshes, 1 rig, and bind them both to the same rig and import them separately + animation retarget in Unreal?

Edit: Just now I’ve found a couple (very old) of tutorials (for ue4 specifically) but I’m asking here due to the videos themselves saying that their method isn’t the best. “Master Pose Component”

  1. I’m not sure if my hair sculpt is too complicated yet. I want to simplify it but I keep getting feedback that it’s fine and suits the character. In addition, I may want to use different hair styles in the future or whatever. Dumb question probably but is there anything reasonably stopping me from just making the hair a separate static mesh and “attaching it” to the head joint with an offset and then just using a little bit of physics (or hand modeling the hair with its own rig or whatever) and have that just work?

I apologize for all of the questions; this is a large undertaking for me and I’m trying to understand what I’m doing so that I don’t make an irreversible mistake and/or waste a ridiculous amount of time.