Struggling with small details on a retopo mesh for a game

tmeucci

I've failed to find anything online to answer my question: Is it acceptable to have multiple, unconnected meshes in a game character?

This sculpted character is for a game, so will it cause any problems during texturing, animating, or even for performance if I were to make these tiny strings on the side of his shirt (and in other places) separate from his body? 

I'm a noob to topology and the retopology process in general. These little strings are already very confusing as it is, without having to connect them to the rest. I'm hoping I may not have to. If I didn't, there'd probably be ~50 additional small meshes on this character.

Ignore the asymmetry issues on the left there

Eric Chadwick

You can use these kinds of details if you want. However, they don't add appreciably to the silhouette, so they should probably be baked down into normal maps.

tmeucci

Eric Chadwick said:

You can use these kinds of details if you want. However, they don't add appreciably to the silhouette, so they should probably be baked down into normal maps.

Is this not going to look weird due to the space beneath these strings?

Kanni3d

Bake it down and judge for yourself, sometimes you'll be surprised how much fidelity a normal map can mimic. Not to mention the amount of geo + headache it saves.

will it cause any problems during texturing, animating, or even for performance if I were to make these tiny strings on the side of his shirt (and in other places) separate from his body?

But to answer your original question: Texturing? no. Performance? negligible since it's a handful more geo but nothing too crazy. Animation? It could cause issues. Having it weight painted and not watertight/contiguous with the mesh is asking for it to be floating away causing visible ugly gaps.

DavidCruz

Just going to use myself as an example here the linked animation, that entire design is a bunch of objects.  Now i haven't worked on any titles in a while but even when i did on the NDS systems way back when  (and a test i did on a Q3Rally mod) they had objects kind of smashed together too (loose wheels), like loose arms from the body and things like that.  I'd look into it more to be sure or try to export some meshes from some games and just do what they did.  Even go and ask some Animation people on artstation, straight up, that might be the best move.
I generally use, dummy objects in max to make things do what i want them to, idk how engines handle those dummy objects from max or if they even read them at all.