I’m working with Chaos Cloth in Unreal Engine and using the Dataflow Cloth Asset system to turn a Static Mesh into a Cloth Asset. Instead of manually painting the constraints with the brush tool, I want to use pre-imported vertex colors from my 3D software (Houdini) to define pinned and dynamic areas. My vertex colors are already visible in Unreal (e.g., Red = pinned, Black = free cloth).
Is there a way to access and use vertex colors inside Dataflow to automatically set up cloth constraints? If so, what nodes should I use? Or is manual painting the only option at the moment?
Ever figure this out? I’m trying to to the same thing and there are a few dataflow nodes for setting vertex color, but nothing for using it or copying it to various cloth attributes, which was a great time-saver in the old workflow.
This is coming in 5.8. I will have a write up in EDC hopefully around the release or shortly after based on schedule, but here’s the gist…
In my example, I’m importing a Render mesh with vertex colors painted. I actually used a texture map gradient in Maya and converted it to a vertex map. This is a skelMesh, should work for StaticMesh, too. I also have UV’s for a transfer step below.
..and for extra credit, I’m transferring to a sim mesh (technically, it’s the same mesh -same UVs) without Vertex colors.. setting the Mesh Target to ‘Simulation’ and the Transfer Type to ‘Use Render Mesh’ since that’s where the vertex colors were originally located.
Make sure ‘Map Override’ is set to ‘Add’ and press the transfer button. You may have to click off/on the weight node to see the final visualization appear.
