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It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
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Hanging clothing in games
polygon
Dear Polycount.
I sort of asked this already on Discord, but figured I should frame my question in a more organized manner.
The question is: what is the better (or more "reasonable" for an indie team) approach to animating hanging clothing in UE5?
Cloth sim, bones, something else?..
Someone asked me to make a character for their game. Unfortunately, they do not have any experience with characters so they can't really tell me what the need, rather only what they want.
The character is your standard faceless knight. As per Rule of Cool, he wears a tabard and a fur cape. Everything is supposed to be on "realistic" end of style spectrum.
When asked about what are we supposed to do with clothing (which I have no experience with), they told me we can just use UE5 Cloth Sim.
Well, I'm not sure if it even works for things like that?
1. The cape will (probably) have haircards attached to it.
2. The tabard will look better if it has thickness (or at least thick borders).
I couldn't find any examples of Cloth Sim that had thickness or attached geo. Are there any?
I feel like this the type of situation where I'm supposed to model with animation in mind, right? So what am I to do here?
I feel like this the type of situation where I'm supposed to model with animation in mind, right? So what am I to do here?
This situation actually happens to me for a second time: something about cape-wearing brooding men that indie-begginers just can't resist 
So I'd like to have a better options in a conversation like this other than "I've got a bad feeling about this".
What are good practices?
Thank you for your time.
Replies
Cloth in Fortnite is made with bones :
More generally this kind of stuff is always more tricky to setup than what one would expect - so, never ever leave it "for later". In the sense of : don't even begin a cape or hood design before being 100% certain that the tech to make it move actually works, with a representative ingame prototype.
Also it's always a good idea to design such elements in a way that allows them to be skin weighted the good old way (moving with the skeleton of the character) as a fallback, especially since there is a pretty good chance that a fancy cape solution ends up being dropped later in development. Lastly, treating cape objects as separate modular parts (as opposed to intricate designs attached to the character in a visually complex way) is a good idea too.
A setup with a bone chain and a trail controller :
My instinct says physics driven bones are less likely to do weird shit and are almost certainly more performant (low bar in this case tbf)
I'll caveat all that by saying I've not had to set up a character that had flappy cloth stuff in 7-8 years so the Sims might be amazing now
Oh, I was afraid of exactly that. But since my opinion wasn't based on anything other than a vague gut feeling, it [understandably] wasn't taken seriously :')
It's fortunate that current design is a completely separate piece, at least.
@poopipe, thanks!
Most "how to" tutorials about cloth sim that I found so far, didn't show particularly appealing results. It looks... odd.
Made me wonder if this tech was only used on a smaller out-of-the-way areas. Or if these examples were just very basic and there was a more sophisticated "real" way to use it.