Cloth simulation on 2 diferent materials

Development Character & Animation
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1

I have one mesh with 2 materials. Cloth simulation in Unreal works with materials, but I can’t join both materials in one for resolution purposes.

Is there a way to avoid Cloth simulation separate mesh for both materials and act as one mesh?

2

There’s probably a better way maybe, but the way I found to get around this is making a single proxy mesh for the geom that has multiple materials.

  • In your DCC if you can paint your max Distance using vertex paint to paint one of the RGB channels like red or somthing. (This is to make multiple cloth paint channels in UE.)
  • Export your stuff to unreal.
  • Make a cloth channel for each material by selecting the sim mesh making the channel and use the “copy from vertex color” to import the paint you did in your DCC.
  • The trick here is to A) Set the scaling factor to 100, and B) Toggle the “Active Cloth Paint” tool on, you should see the paint you did in your DCC then off. (This will allow it to cach the paint from the vertext paint you did.
  • Assign that channel to one of your materials.
  • Do this again for your other material.
  • Once those cloth channels are assign to the materials the render mesh should appear as if its simming as a single piece.

Good tutorial on making sim meshs or proxy meshs:

Best of luck!

3

You van have multiple skeletal meshes attached.
The caviat is that they will interpenetrate each other using Apex.

In theory, should chaos cloth actually work, the interpenetration may be solved by allowing the cloth to collid with the world.

Secondly.
Resolution has absolutely nothing to do with how many meshes are used…

And more importantly nothing prevents uv mapping different faces to different textures by having different UVs…

4

Say you have a cloth with 4 materials… what if you use material layers/layer blends and then use alpha channels for the underlying layers to show?

5

Does the material need to have different apex definitions? If not, then it doesnt really matter how you do it.
Differnt UVs for each, or different material layers would all work.
Even vertex paint to differentiate the layers would work.

The real question you should ask is why and what for.
A render? Even different materials.
A game? One UV. One material. The texturing defines colors.