Looking for some advice.

Rayvhen

Im currently working on a game quality character and I'm in the process of blocking out the low poly in Maya. (I know, it would be easier to start in Zbrush but I'm a creature of habit) What I'm curious about is the character will have rips and tears in parts of his costume. Now for low poly I could just use a transparency map to simulate the holes on a single plane. With bumping up the quality with a high poly for generating normals, what would your process be to achieve this? Dynamesh subtractive geo into the mesh to punch out holes? Would I be able to sculpt the necessary details into a single plain and have wrinkles and material textures translate and just use a transparency map as I would for a low poly model? Any help or links to a tutorial would be great. For the sake of simplicity lets say it's targeted destination is UE4. Thanks in advance.

Rayvhen

If it helps it is cloth I am trying to rip and model, for the sake of simplicity if you were modeling a cape on a character that had tears and rips in it, what would your pipeline for that look like? Any help would be appreciated.

slosh

There are a number of ways to do it but you could just sculpt the tears and then if you really wanted to have the holes on your highpoly, you could retopo the holes and just project your detail.  I might even just model them into the mesh I was going to sculpt onto.  

Rayvhen

Now would you approach it as a single plane or would you give it some depth?