Rigging Triangular Meshes Without Dying in the Attempt
Did your character come out of Marvelous Designer with more tris than a sack of french fries? 🥔 Don't worry, you can rig and animate it without going through the ordeal of retopology. Although purists may clutch their heads, in many cases working with tris is perfectly viable. That said, with some important nuances. 💡
HumanIK Doesn't Discriminate by Topology
Maya's HumanIK system is like that friend who doesn't judge: it doesn't care if your mesh is in tris, quads, or made with toothpicks. The only thing that matters to it is:
- The bone hierarchy is properly configured
- The skinning is correctly applied
- There are no orphaned vertices floating around
So you can import your model directly from Marvelous Designer and start animating without remorse. 🎭
nCloth and Simulations: Friends or Enemies?
For cloth simulations with nCloth, the real problem isn't the tris, but:
- Excessively dense meshes
- Inverted faces or dirty geometry
- Poorly configured colliders
A character in tris can be perfect as a collider, as long as it doesn't look like Swiss cheese at the topological level.
When You Should Consider Retopologizing
There are cases where tris aren't the best option:
- If you're going to export to game engines 🎮
- For complex facial animation
- When you need clean subdivisions for final render
But if you only need a functional character to simulate clothing, save yourself the extra work. After all, in production sometimes what matters is getting to render, not having the prettiest topology in the west. 🤠
So the next time someone tells you that "that's not how it's done", remind them that in the real world there are deadlines... and not everyone has time to retopologize every last wrinkle. 😉