Hello, I have a weird issue with custom clothing created for metahuman characters. I have various clothing skeletal mesh components, and have used Set Master Pose Component in the construction script so they all work off what the main character body mesh is doing. Rough edges and WIP nature aside, this works well enough up close to the camera, but at some particular distance it all breaks down and it looks as though the clothing just stops animating. Some of these pieces have generated LODs and others are LOD0 only, but all display the same behaviour. I’ve attached a quick video below to illustrate the problem.
Anyone have any suggestions or advice for what may be going on here? Any help would be much appreciated, my attempts to figure out the issue alone have not been successful.
At long distances, the engine doesn’t really know which garment is in front of which because of floating point precision.
Usually, you never have a different mesh under another.
What you do is you crop out the underlying mesh to remove whatever geometry the clothing cover.
Which is also better for performance on all possible levels.
A good mantra is:
If it’s not on screen, it shouldn’t exist.
I’ll definitely at some point soon be creating a version of the body mesh that contains only necessary stuff for various clothing combinations for the performance reasons you mention, but something else is happening here that seems very strange to me. I paused the game and went in with debug camera to illustrate the extremity a little better. First image is an AI pawn close to my character, second one is a pawn that’s more distant with the problem a bit clearer. It definitely seems like something more than the expected clipping of the body and clothing meshes (which hasn’t been too bad at all when it works, performance considerations aside).
It looks like it’s the clothing simulation that’s active when it shouldn’t be.
There’s no need for clothing to simulate past 10m from camera. Unless it’s a cloak or something that absolutely requires if.
Not sure if there’s any built in ways to disable that though.
Also, consider that your cloth paint may be wrong/too intense.
Try removing cloth and seeing if you get the same issue first.
If you do not, you know it’s cloth driven.
Did you ever manage to resolve this issue? If so, how?
I mean cloth simulation is clearly not the issue, because it isn’t even active.
The issue is that Set Master Pose literally stops working past a certain distance.
In my project it looks like it stops working at the exact same distance as in the one posted here.
So did anyone figure out how to fix that?
It seems like an issue that should affect a significant amount of developers, so I’m a bit confused that this is the only thread I could find mentioning it.
This was just a little test project I was doing so I didn’t spend too much longer with it. I don’t believe I ever did figure out why it was doing this and I havent tested it out again in the time since.
Surprised to hear this is still an issue and that others are saying they’re still running into it. My day job is environment art, so I only mess with character stuff from time to time for fun.
I’d have thought this might have been encountered more commonly by character artists/animators, but from the comments in this thread, it seems perhaps not.
