Cloth gets blocked

Hey,

I am using the new clothing tool of Unreal engine. And I have been struggling lately with the clothing system of Unreal Engine.
My problem is that something blocks the cloth and I don’t know what it is. I tried to create two different 3D models which is just a standard plane. I have done this in two separate ways.

  1. A plane with a bone.
  2. A plane without a bone.

The plane with the bone showed some results but it was getting blocked by something.
The plane without the bone showed a better result but again, it was getting blocked too.

I have tried using 3ds Max with a PhysX tool and this tool told me to use bones. But after reading the documentation, I have noticed that Unreal Engine has a clothing tool. And I decided to use this new tool.

Could someone explain to me why this is happening and not working?

Hey i had the same problem!
You can change the cloth Max Distance and will works

Thanks Bro, you’re awesome !

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On a flag you have to set the distance of the last vertex to match the lenght of the cloth.
Or else the cloth won’t be able to fully drape from its original shape.

When simulating flags with bones to make it so you can use physics, you usually keep the distance very low and rely on a bone rig of some sort to deal with collisions.
Setting the cloth distance to around 3cm usually works best for those - you want to prevent clipping into other stuff as much as possible, but still retain the natural like feel that cloth adds.

Because cloth is probably now Chaos as well, I don’t think the old physX paint tools apply any longer to newer engine versions.
It may be best to just use vertex paint and the editor for it.

Assuming that epic devs are as lazy as they prove to be by not dealing with bug reports - then the way cloth works is likely the same/a low rate copy of physx.

Each vertex is allowed to move in a radius around its original spot by the macimum distance defined for it.

ApexCloth definitions provided a backstop value as well, which could also be the cause for issues like the one you experienced if it were ever properly implemented (but it never was).
It wssentially would make it so that the cloth could move only in the direction of the normal unless you define a value greater than 0 - in which case it can move backwards into the character by a defined amount.
*I think that on a flag like piece a value of 0 may work, you’d have to test. It doesn’t work as Nvidia intended, so its still fairly pointless

Reference to the tool for older engine users:

https://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/content/gameworkslibrary/physx/apexsdk/APEX_Clothing/ClothingTool.html

And building the tool from source/using the tool actually beats trying to use the engine including the fact that the tool will acrually respect more collision and possibly backstop (as least, it works better using the cloth definitions from it, with a backstop value of 0 being respected.)