Hey guys, two questions. Is this topology good for animation in the elbow? Secondly in the wrist area, do I need to do anything special with the shirt topology when my character bends his hands for it to look good, or will the topology for the hand itself under the shirt be sufficient for animation assuming that I could leave both the characters’ wrist topology under the clothes along with the shirt wrist topology too? (My naked character is already rigged and it works properly) Sorry, I’m a newbie.
Over all, I’m wondering how to topologize these areas to facilitate animation. I’m planning on hiding the character underneath to reduce vertice count.
For shirts, I ignore the elbow. If you take out a well-worn button-up, you’ll have trouble finding any crease at the elbow. That’s because the shirt sleeve tends to ignore arm twist. You can minimize a lot of ugly deformation simply by cancelling shirt sleeve twist (by using damped track constraints targeting shoulder, elbow and wrist.) Suggested topology for doing that is just a bunch of loops, an extruded cylinder. This also creates the pleasing detail of the wrist rotating within the shirt sleeve, just like it does in real life.
The amount that a particular sleeve ignores arm twist has to do, mostly, with how tight it is. A tighter sleeve does rotate with the arm. You can create a “shirt armature” that only acquires some twist from the arm, rather than none or all of it.
For wrists, no, I wouldn’t include any hand weights on a shirt sleeve whatsoever. Even for very long sleeves, the way that hands rotate will make a weighted sleeve look like it’s changing length. If you have very long sleeves that don’t look right when you ignore the hand, I would recommend looking at some different deformation techniques. Maybe the first thing I’d try, if I could afford the physics, would be a dynamic mesh deform from a non-rendering cloth physics mesh (only for the very end, to minimize problems and improve performance.)
I suppose a rocker bone setup might be okay for a shirt wrist as well. That could prevent it from ever growing longer, only shorter.
