I’m still learning some of the basics of using Apex Clothing on my characters, and have it mostly working, except now it behaves strangely sometimes when performing certain animations, causing the cloth to start twitching violently around and through the character, and I can’t figure out why or how exactly to fix/prevent this from happening.
An example of the issue is in the video below:
As you can see in the video, for the most part the cloth behaves fine for the first half of the video(some minor clipping aside), but sometimes like when I toggled flight on and off, it’ll start twitching all over the place and clipping completely through the character.
I’ve tried adjusting almost every setting I can think of, but I can’t figure out the source of the problem… Anyone else have any ideas?
Make sure the cloth is set to self-collide. This is a setting in Maya/Max
Set the self-collision distance to 5 or 6 units, and go from there
Make sure the character has an Apex ragdoll on the bones, this will help it not cut into the legs. Sphylls are probably best to use
Tweak the settings of the cloth. It might be a little too light here. Set it to something similar to burlap to test (you can see the settings for burlap in the Content Examples that Epic provides, there’s a cloth level)
I’ve tried all of those, and fiddled with every setting possible, both in Max and in UE4, and I still get wildly inconsistent results.
For example, I have two different clothing options with similar cloth simulated bits, one is a full dress(simulation only on the skirt portion), the other just the skirt(With the same Apex settings), and I gave them both the exact same settings(Again, in both Max and UE4), the skirt clips through the character’s legs constantly every time I start to move around, the full dress only does it occasionally but otherwise collides correctly with the backstop. Other times, it seems like the backstop settings are being ignored entirely.
I’ve even tried blending more towards skin weighting than the cloth simulation itself, and that helps a little with the wild twitching, but it’s still clipping through the legs enough that it just looks really bad (again, as if it’s ignoring the Backstop settings).
I can report a similar issue as this. I am willing to bet this problem does not exist in 4.7 - it only started happening when we went from 4.7 to 4.8. (A different problem returned in 4.8)
Two third parties with the same issue:
Hi, I don’t know if you got that right already. I think the crazy twitching may be happening because of the cloth’s interation with the collision hulls, i believe it keeps jumping like that 'cause the damping value is low. I faced something similar in the project I’m working.
Try raising the damping value to something higher, like 0.6 - 1.0. See if it works.
Hope it helps
Tried that already, didn’t seem to make any difference.
I had to take the blending to almost completely Skin weighted instead of simulated (Set at 0.2 currently, which works sorta okay) just to get it to look reasonable, but it’s still clipping through the legs pretty bad…
I’m thinking at this point I’m just going to need to forgo the cloth simulation to avoid such embarrassing buggy visuals until they’re more reliable to work with.
For smaller accessories, I’m sure that Apex works fine, but sadly I don’t think it was really designed with skirts in mind…
