Discover the ultimate workflows for optimizing animated cloth in Unreal Engine. In this technical breakdown, we analyze how Chaos Cloth impacts performance, evaluate VAT and WPO trade-offs, and explore methods to save CPU overhead.
https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/98jP/a-guide-to-cloth-animation-optimization-in-unreal-engine
That is a solid contribution to the Learning community, Sergey! It’s very refreshing to see this sort of wisdom share, so I personally really appreciate it.
Concerning the cloth optimization solutions and tips you presented: great stuff, and I think this will be very helpful for many people not familiar with this area of UE (and other engines too - those same concepts translate well). I was just sharing similar advice over in a Reddit thread yesterday. Apart from VATs I also mentioned shader-based vertex manipulation or Alembic caches. Their use-case wasn’t cloth, but general animation of many entities in a scene (and wasn’t UE specific).
As an aside - I’m constantly making an effort to call out non-educational content that has been seeping its way onto the Learning platform. We’re seeing content ranging from sneaky grey-area advertising, to full on spam being tagged/categorized as tutorials and such, which is of course a forever-battle on any platform. So I think it’s important people in the community also make an effort to show their appreciation when someone takes the time and makes the effort to share their knowledge like you have here.
Keep up the great work!
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Great breakdown. The key is knowing when to simulate and when to fake it. Chaos Cloth is great for hero assets, but VAT/WPO can save a lot of CPU for crowds and background elements. Smart LODs, simpler sim meshes, and profiling are usually where the biggest wins come from. A good optimization mindset is: simulate only what the player will actually notice.
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