Blender>Apex Clothing Tool>UE4?

Gezu · January 4, 2017, 7:31pm

mahri726;533657:

Hi. It’s been a few years since I started this thread, but I found a solution to clothing pipeline so I tought to post it here in case that someone needs it.

So here is the guide:

Model the character, clothing and rig them. They should have different materials. Import the character in UE4.

In Clothing Tool

Import the character. You might select z axis up from the last tab if it is not oriented correctly.

Select the cloth mesh from the top left and click on generate tangent space.

select UV origin bottom left !!! It can be found in a drop-down menu.
If you don’t select this setting, when you apply the apb file in UE4, the textures will look weird.

4 Paint the distances

Click on Generate collision volumes and move, scale or rotate the capsules as you desire. Click on Build Collision. If you add more, you might need to remove others. Sometimes, the mesh will cover the movement gyzmo and it won’t be visible. Be sure to switch from solid to wireframe mode to be sure where to move the collision capsules. Sometimes, if you click the move button and switch to other tab, the gyzmo is still active, but hidden by the mesh, so you could have the surprise to notice that capsules have moved from their places while you were painting distances. Be sure to press move again once you’ve finished manipulating capsules.

Click on build collision. You should do this everytime you add or remove a capsule, or before export, to be sure.

Click on single layer cloth, then simulate to see if the collision volumes are positioned correctly and there is no clipping. You could play with the wind.

save asset as apb instead of apx

In UE4 :

Import the character in UE4, then in Persona, import the apb clothing file. In 4.11, there is a bug that crashes the editor if you import more than one. It might be solved in future versions. You could also edit phisics proprietes. For short skirts, setting the gravity vallue to 3 or 4 works ok.

Select the apb file under the material for your cloth.

Success !

Over the last two days I’ve been sticking with the blender to ue4 cloth export process. This post helped me a lot and I collected a some additional notes I found useful. You can try these if it doesn’t work otherwise.

BLENDER:

First try with the most simple setup. One bone, one subdivided plane.
In blender scene settings set the length to metric and the scale to 0.01 (or use the centimeter preset). Otherwise there will be scale issues such as giant cape. .D
Your mesh should be weighted to only one bone. The weight of all vertexes should be 1. For me using different weight values caused some wierd deformation. If your setup works with this setup you might try to experiment with other weight painting methods.
Use the 7.4 binary fbx exporter. Leave the export scale to 1. Export mesh and rig (you can export animation as well, but for me it didn’t work inside apex).

APEX:

Note that there are three version of Apex Clothing tool. The latest is 1.3.2 (for me all version worked, 1.3.0 gave me some error but still did the job)
Paint the distances. You can change the value of the distance. (I used .4) For test use the Flood button with the value then paint 0 to the top vertexes so that your cloth won’t fall down.
Even if you don’t use collision click on generate collision values. Find the bone which controls your cloth, select it and click ‘Pick as root bone’. When I skipped this my cloth snapped to some other locations in UE4. If you managed to pick the proper bone, you can see its name in the simulation window as root bone.
For me apx worked fine.

Text Editor (Sublime Text, Notepad++, etc.)

Unreal will rename your bones if they ends with ‘.R’ or ‘.L’ (or .anything) to ‘_R’, ‘_L’. If your rig contains names like those you need to change them in the apx file manually (from .R to _R for example). Open the apx file with a text editor and replace them. Otherwise you will get an error in UE4 that the apx file refers to bones you don’t have.

Hope it will help you guys.