Modeling Teeth for Unreal?

Development Character & Animation
1

Hey, I’m pretty new to the whole modeling and content creation here.
I’ve looked around a bit and can’t really find anyone talking about this. There seems to be two major methods of modeling teeth, either as separate pieces for each tooth, or as a whole block of teeth that are actually connected where each tooth touches.

What’s the best way to model them if you plan on bringing your model into Unreal? Seems to me that the single block would be better, as you can have your low poly version with just kind of a cylinder for the teeth and use the normal and displacement maps to make them look decent. Or does it matter?

2

To be honest, either method would work. It ultimately depends on your personal preference / style and how you wish to accomplish the task at hand. There’s really not a right or wrong way to do this.

I can see a benefit to modelling them separately. For example, if you’d like to damage individual teeth at a later point. Though, for most, they will likely not be a focus point. As such, most people won’t spend a huge amount of time on this aspect of character creation.