Attach APEX cape to a character

So, I feel like I’ve finally figured out how Blueprints want me to attach things to characters… but for some reason, I’m having trouble trying to figure out how to attach a cape to a character. I tried experimenting with a flag, and I was able to attach it as a Skeletal Mesh component, and the flag did wave in the wind. Unfortunately, it does not collide with the environment. At all. I tried looking in all the settings, and while there is a “Collide with environment” checkbox in the Skeletal Mesh details, it doesn’t seem to work. I would really like to be able to remove the cape from the character, so I don’t want to rig the cape to the character, but is that step necessary?

Also, if anyone can figure out how to make Apex cloth collide with the world… I also need to know how to do that just for generic objects. I’m using UE 4.10. Thank you!

If you want to be able to attack and remove a cape, you’ll have to use a different mesh for it, but you need bones for APEX to work and I could only get it to collide with the collision shape defined for the mesh. If you give your cape a different material, then you can make it invisible and disable cloth simulation, which isn’t really removing, but it’s probably a lot easier for you.
To get collisions to work, you need to create the PhysX collision volumes for the parts of your mesh that collide with the cloth (which you either do in the APEX SDK or in the PhysX plugin of your modelling software if you use Maya or 3Ds Max).
Collision with the environment is something that I also couldn’t get to work.

Ugh. I suppose I can make just bind the cloth to the character and do it “the right way…” but if that means the cloth and character are considered one unit, and the only way to hide the cloth is to make the material translucent, that would be a huge spike in rendering cost for something that’s just not supposed to be rendering at all. Besides, I wanted to see if I could make it a gameplay element, like you can fly with the cape on, you can fight stronger with the cape off, but if you want to fly again, you need to go back and retrieve the cape. Just for example.

I know APEX uses a hybrid of GPU and CPU simulation, but all of the collision models are handled by the CPU. It’s impossible to give the GPU the collision models because the GPU only renders whatever is captured by the g buffer. That’s why if you’re making a rain particle with GPU sprites, they’ll fall right through the roofs of buildings if you don’t actually have the top section of the roof in view. But I also know APEX uses hybrid rendering to allow some CPU models, and I had done some APEX destructibles in UDK that allowed CPU physics. I was wondering if there was any cloth model in UE4 at all that was able to render proper cloth collisions with the environment. I know CPU cloths were expensive, but I really wish they came back as an alternative method to APEX.