I’m having a lot of trouble recording my chaos flesh asset that’s attached to my main character. The character is a jiggly cube essentially, with flesh asset kinematic attachment to the bottom cube face vertices.
It feels and looks great and jiggly when playing, but as it’s a live chaos flesh asset it does not run very well. So the advice is to use an ML deformer to train the flesh asset in how to jiggle without the performance overhead.
Problem is when I go to record the character with the chaos cache manager in take recording, it records the movement only without any of the cool physics deformation.
Anyone got some advice or links to tutorials for this?
I’m in UE 5.8 and AI is not being super helpful with this particular problem.
Checking with my peers, the jiggle isn’t part of the character’s skeletal animation. It’s a simulation result, so recording the character’s movement won’t capture the flesh deformation. The missing step is recording the simulation data, and then generate a Geometry Cache from it, and that’s what the ML Deformer will use for training. UE’s doc on chaos flesh refers to that point here:
So, the setup should look like this:
Your chaos manager is set to “Record”
Your character’s flesh component is listed “Observed Components”
There’s a Chaos Cache Collection assigned to save the recording
Run the simulation, and make sure Cache Collection captured the data
From there, you can generate the Geometry Cache by converting the recorded deformation
Before training, make sure that the resulting cache and your animation match, and have the same numbers of frames, vertex, and poses
Hi, thanks for the response. I was doing most of this, but it wouldn’t work for me, and the chaos cache manager was crashing my game/causing bugs in gameplay. I figured this feature is too buggy to use reliably - or at least I couldn’t figure it out.
However, I found a way! Essentially skip the chaos cache manager and use the Take Recording, then use the Flesh Asset preview on an animation generated from that to get the chaos cache/geometry cache.
Here’s my steps in case others have the same issue:
Take Recording with character actor
Open recording subscene for character
Click “bake animation” or similar - ensure it’s set to “world” transform to get the animation moving around properly
Ensure that the skeletal mesh has a default flesh deformer enabled (DG_FleshDeformer)
Open flesh asset and in preview scene, plug in that animation
Ensure there is a cache collection to save to
Hit RECORD to record the animation with deformation into that chaos cache collection
Click NewGeometryCache to create a file for saving geometry caches into
Select GenerateGeometryCache to save the animation + flesh deformation into the geometry cache
Open new geometry cache to confirm it recorded deformations
Now create the ML Deformer
New issue though: the ML Deformer won’t accept my skeletal mesh!
I’ve debugged with Gemini/Claude and came to the conclusion that skeletal meshes with editing using Unreal’s built in editor (e.g. welding edges) causes the ML Deformer to spit out a “Skeletal Mesh asset needs to be reimported” error.
I will create another thread for this issue - it’s driving me a little mad trying to figure this stuff out!
Hello again! Glad you were able to find a workaround. As for the crash, it would be useful to share any resulting logs from it here, maybe we can pinpoint where it fails, beyond the experimental nature of the feature.
As for the problem with your deformer and the skeletal mesh, it either of the assets were modified in a way that theur vertex data was altered, then it would make sense for UE to request a re-import. Just for testing, try editing the assets in Blender instead, then reimport to UE as a .FBX file.