Everything I have seen so far for cloth simulation in Unreal has been using APEX. I went to the APEX site and it builds for PC, XBOX, PS, Android. I need cloth simulation on Mac and iOS. I opened the cloth content examples for UE4 and that only builds for Mac and Windows. Is it possible to do cloth simulation for iOS? Am I missing something?
My next question would then be What would be the best way to animate a towel being spun into a towel whip by having the player control one end of the towel?
The quality of real-time cloth simulation is probably not going to be able to do that, layered stuff is difficult to simulate even when you don’t need it in real-time.
Could I maybe produce a mesh that is essentially a rope and give it a twisted towel texture that will look believable and that after flicking it a bit, trigger an animation where the folding undoes itself?
I’ve not looked into this in a while, but from what I remember APEX is used for physics simulations only. It is not used for Cloth or Destruction simulations on mobile, at least not yet.
This may be planned for sometime in the future, but I am not sure if there is a time-frame of when this would happen.
I need the player to be able to spin one end of a towel to twist it up. I need that animation to be realistic. Then perhaps once the towel is twisted, I can substitute the towel for an mesh that mimics a real whip. Are there any examples of how to implement a whip (real-time, where the player is constantly controlling the tail end of the whip?)
That’s super specific and I don’t recall ever seeing that in a game. I think you’re going to have to implement it yourself. It shouldn’t be too hard, just animate the arms and the whip. as far as rolling the cloth goes that may be a bit difficult but maybe some combination of a texture and a pan effect (there’s a texture node that basically animates lines, or blocks of color from left to right) might work. It’s a complex problem.