Having animation in mind, what’s the best way to retopologize a cloth mesh? Should I create a clean straigth mesh paying attention to limbs deformation or maybe it’s better to follow the flow of the folds to build in more details?
Sorry if my answer is way off what you were looking for. Have we seen any UT models yet, or UE4 ones? From an animation point of view, I expect the character will spend time sitting, crouching, kneeling so something like a trenchcoat should fall right. When it comes to physics karma I have no idea what that would do to it. You sound like you are making something highly detailed so probably best to look at a similar material in life. Do you mean texturing it or actually modelling in folds? Sorry for my noob answer here, cheers.
Sorry, I wasn’t talking about cloth physics. I was talking about mesh geometry, the orange cage compared to the blue cage in the image below:
I’m pretty sure that the orange one is recommended for easy and better deformations, while the blue one would give more details to the mesh. I was asking an opinion about which one would be better for a game character.
Thanks for the demonstration. I’d go for realism personally as the poly count doesn’t look too high. Of course rig up your own bones for animation too, should be part of the joy of character creation I think though I’ve yet to make any, this year I feel I’m going to be making plenty.
i’d say the painful answer is both, try where posible to maintain a quad mesh (sub-d/tasseliseation) but also you need enough polys where the mesh deforms to have nice anims
alot depends on your target polycount and the ammount of LOD’s that you plan, so in the end no set answer but a few guidelines
I guessed so. Maybe I’ll try to conform to the flow of the folds in the bust area while keeping a more “straight” geometry for shoulders and arms, where folds are less visibles and good deformation is crucial. Thanks, if anyone has other advice or examples to share feel free to post, it would help me a lot!
You can get that detail in the normal map, but if you look at some of the character models in games these days they often do follow the folds with their edge flow, I think it’s a matter of keeping in mind how the geometry will deform, so avoid doing that on things like the elbow or armpits because that needs to have a particular edge flow to deform nicely.
One benefit of the middle polyflow is that it’s a one size fits all short sleeve mesh (i.e. you could use twenty different sculpts on it via normal maps).
Whereas with the custom fit geometry you’d have to retopologise for every different sculpt you do.