Apex cloth problems

Development Character & Animation
1

I’m having some workflow issues with getting Apex cloth into the engine. My problem stems from the fact that cloth needs bones but every tool I have takes the same file and restructures the skeleton differently.

My current skeletal mesh has been exported from Blender.

Maya: If I import the FBX from blender, make the cloth then export the .apx cloth from Maya, the bones don’t match the Blender rig.
C4D: If I import the FBX from blender, make the cloth then export the .fbx cloth from C4D, the bones don’t match the Blender rig. (Root node missing)
Blender: If I import the cloth mesh from C4D, add it to my skeletal mesh and export it as an FBX, the Nvidia Apex cloth tool says there’s no valid FBX binary or XML data in the file (it was exported as binary).

I’d have to ditch my rigging setup and try to do it in Maya to resolve this and that’s a big step. Can anyone see a way around this? What’s a good workflow?

2

Blender 2.71 has cloth :slight_smile: seems to work great

3

Really?! Can it do Apex cloth files? Admittedly I didn’t look, I just googled “blender apex UE4” and just found videos of people using the nvidia tool.

4

Yeah Blender 2.71 has cloth :slight_smile: It works great! I had same issues so I started using blenders cloth LOL…Just as good a the big boys.

5

It has cloth simulation but you cant import it -> you will need apex for that

I always do it like that:

  1. create the rigg + mesh + animations in blender
  2. select the skeletal mesh and press Obejct (beside the object/edit/.-Apply-Scale/Location/Rotation
  3. export it
  4. import it (I think I have to choose cm or mm in the import settings)
  5. create the cloth part: The char in the video was actually exported from blender
  6. follow he steps in the video
6

Thanks for that! Are you able to comment on why the Nvidia apex cloth tool is failing to import Blender FBX files? (I’ll watch the video in a moment, at work right now).

7

Take a look at this video when you are trying to import something into apex sdk: In the upper video I use the 3ds apex plugin :wink: