Currently how I make my clothing, is I rig them to the character’s skeleton in Blender, import it as skeletal mesh into unreal, again using the same skeleton as the base character is using, then use the “Set Leader Pose Component”, so that the clothing follows the character bones.
Is there a better way for this in Unreal? Is Chaos Cloth only for physically simulated clothing, or can I also use it for regular clothing that moves the same way character does?
Again, I don’t want actual cloth simulation, because I want to have this clothing pontentially on 100s of actors, so it needs to be performant. I want for example a simple shirt, that sticks to the character. My current method is performant, but it is also a pain to go back and forth between blender and unreal so much.
Wondering if Unreal offers some tools for this, that I missed.
Set leader pose is the typical way you would attach clothing to the character. You could also use copy pose in animBP, but it’s more expensive.
Is Chaos Cloth only for physically simulated clothing, or can I also use it for regular clothing that moves the same way character does?
Chaos cloth is only for physically simulating clothing, it can’t attach clothing to the character in the same way that Set Leader Pose does. To get the clothing to follow, you need to weight it to your character. In Blender you can transfer the skinning data from the character mesh to clothing automatically, though depending on the type of clothing and topology it might not work so well.
I want to have this clothing pontentially on 100s of actors, so it needs to be performant.
Regardless of how you handle clothing, hundreds of humanoid actors on screen at once is not going to perform well. For something like that you would typically use Niagara, vertex animations, instanced skeletal meshes, or Mass Entity. If you must have hundreds of actors on screen, I’d pick one of these methods and work on implementing that first before worrying about stuff like clothing. You can go back later when the tech is working and figure out how to incorporate clothing.