How to retopo and rig a model with loose flowing fabric?

Purplenurple

So as a personal project I'm attempting to make my own unreal game character. My goal is to get this guy into the engine with a walk animation to start and have the lower part of his robe and rope belt have fabric physics applied to them. He's already sculpted in zbrush (seen here) and I'm retopologizing him at the moment. Retopologizing the robe is tripping me up at the moment because of what I want it to do in regards to the fabric physics on the lower half. I'm not quite sure how to tackle it. Should I split up the robe and make the lower half be a sepreate mesh from the torso and make the torso ultimately part of the rigged body (underneath the clothes he's just a head and hands right now, though I do have a complete body model saved)? Or should I use the whole body model, rig that, then lay the robe on top? If anyone can help or point to a tutorial somewhere that would be great. So far I haven't been able to find one that addresses how to rig a model that has loose flow-y clothing.

Alex_J

not a ton of experience with this and not in unreal, but one way i knnow is to add some extra joints the cloth gets weighted too, and the joints use a cloth simulation. Maya has some easy stuff in bonus tools you could use for testing, but i think for unreal you got to look at marketplace to see what you can use.

as far as topology goes, similar to what you want for good sculpting: equidistant quad topology for the cloth. i dont think lower part needs to be separate mesh if you are doing the simulation from skeleton. Probably wouldnt want mesh underneath unless it would be made visible when the cloth flaps. Try to avoid ugly penetration as much as possible, though even in the biggest AAA games there is usually a small amount.

Purplenurple

Avoiding penetration from an underlying model was my motivation for deleting everything from the body except for the head and hands because they are the only visible things from his body. I thought that splitting the mesh would facilitate me using the top part of the robe as his torso when I go to rig. I think I've got a lot of trial and error ahead of me