Setup for UDK Question

#1

A buddy of mine gave me a rather odd mesh to rig for a UDK character. The mesh is all tri’s and has quite a bit of anatomy/edge flow issues. I guess I have a couple of questions as I’m still fairly new to setting up characters -

Is it even possible to rig a character whose geo is built as tris? Would this cause issues in binding the skin and getting proper deformation? I’m guessing it’s fairly important to have more geo around pinch points and proper edge flow around larger muscle masses.

I’m pretty sure he just ran his scuplt through decimation master and gave me the resulting model. I know it’s not a great model and I’m pretty sure it’s not usable from a rigging standpoint, but I wanna be sure before I bring it up to him.

Any help/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

#2

It should be fine to skin a tri model, you just have to be careful where the edges are hard/soft.
Personally i prefer my animated models to have tris, then I know which way an edge will bend once im animating it. If you have everything as quads then an edge could be displayed in two ways when twisting. Sometimes I think quads can leave too much up the computer to interpret where the edge is. For hard surfaces its not such a big deal to use quads but sometimes you kinda want to know what the edges doing. If its for the UDK engine it may render as tris anyhow as it will need to have some sort of edge in the end.

#3

Thats still a normal mesh. Its just showing edges.
Even if you see a mesh in Maya as all Quads, … you can hold down shift, and R click show all edges and see all the same.
Nothing different.
Skinnable all the same.
Such a shame not even the Masters of like 20 yrs don’t know this using Maya,… and I now work with them every day… I try to explain,… Like a child how math works,. and they still don’t get it. Amazing.
Seriously…

To add to this… working in quads is what Zbrush likes for subdivision, and works best for setting normal angels. SubD modeling. Keep in mind you need to know the difference between normal smoothing and subd smoothing (pressing 3) And pressing 3 is still 2 subdivisions. Mental ray approx editor sub d settings are the same. Just like Vray attrs of subdiv’s for rendertime.
Normal smoothing does not subdivide a mesh, but its always good to make sure your normals are good.

#4

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