Cloth folds topology advice
Hi Guys! I made retopology of my MD pants but not sure if it is right, I do this for my portfolio as game ready character asset, I saw works of some other artist's and they often highlight folds with topology (pics 1 , female) so i thought about my work (pic 2 , with pink background) should i also highlight folds for my pants? or my topology is already fine?
Replies
i'm not familiar with what AAA is doing with characters these days but it seems an needlessly excessive amount of geometry for games IMO.
if the topology is not following the silhouette you may get some weird shading, but just test it and see. it's nothing to do a quick rig and upload to mixamo to get some test animations. that will be faster than making assumptions and doing a bunch of needless manual work
the purpose of the cut-in edges on the first image is to change the silhouette without subdividing the entire mesh. this is a pretty destructive thing to do that makes further work on the model difficult, so if you will do it, be sure to save out the base mesh without any cuts.
save a copy of the model as it is now.
and if you find that the model does not deform well, or the folds don't shade correctly, then you can add the cuts in where needed, just as a way to add more resolution to a specific area, rather than subdividing the entire model.
if you needed to reduce the poly count a lot, then you'd likely want to match the flow of the folds a little more closely in order to hold the silhouette