Cloth does work best in straight even quads. Simplest example would be a cape. Just made from a plane with a lot of spans. But its common to have a render geo wrapped to the sim geo.
Ok, I understand. So if a character has bad posture and always walks with a hunched back for example, the model would still be in a normal pose, then the animators pose it into whatever that characters neutral pose would be?
I would start with only one animal and get expert in it. For example study the next 6 Month only horses. And in the end you should have something like this. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ZKkAN
When I download dubious apps, I test them in a sandbox. Sandboxie for example. The untrusted installer or executable runs in it's own compartmentalized section, and you can see all the files and traffic it generates.
Even then, lots of things deform but are split into multiple objects with unwelded edges for games. The most common example of this is reused body meshes with replaceable heads, typically the head is broken off into a separate object to be modeled.
To get your lowPoly geometry, you can "duplicate clean" all the objects used for your object, reduce them manually and reuse them with traditionnal boolean workflow if needed (with DcBoolManager or Crease+ for example).
So mainly specular in physically based rendering is a real time reflection with parameterizable strength and glossiness? And diffuse is just color information? If thats all, then i think its "easy" to reproduce in UE for example not?
Talking about extra mouse buttons, I think. Depending on the mouse driver, some come with a utility for mapping those buttons to specific actions. For example http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=83360
Normally you can read those patches with a <udim> or patch tag inside of the file loader. For example "weapon_diffuse.UDIM#.exr" or "weapon_diffuse.<udim>.exr". But it depends on the renderer. Then the alembic support could be useful for you.
@AntonioEffectsFX the texturing of the orbs is in regard to the base texture. You can create shaders to draw over the texture of the orb for example freeze, or as this does with the energy. This is rendered over the character / sphere and not an actual texture on the orb.