Retopo/Remesh advice needed - How to proceed?

MaskedApe

Hello all, I am looking for advice on how to proceed with retopologizing (remeshing?) this mesh for in-game use.

An explanation of the following image:
1. The high res mesh from ZBrush
2. The low res basemesh. Basically a cylinder conformed to the surface of the high res.
3. The two meshes together, showing the areas where the large wrinkles do not conform to the quad layout of the low res mesh.
4. After adjusting the verts of the low res mesh to conform to the peaks and valleys of the wrinkles and connecting the peaks with edges. Notice that I mostly kept the horizontal edges of the base mesh flowing horizontally, especially in the knee area, for animation purposes.



Early on, I tried retopologising in a more "traditional" way, like this:


but, by keeping everything as quads, I would end up with diamond shapes in the knee area that I didn't think would deform very well.

So, where do I go from here? To me, it looks "ugly" because it's not all quads and "flowy", but I believe it will be functional for animation. Am I wrong about this? Should I leave it as-is and move on, or how could I improve it?

I appreciate any advice.

Thanks

Obscura

At the end of the day, every polygon gets triangulated, so you can use triangles. Quads are just easier to work with. I would say go with something like what you have on image 4.