New Cloth mesh-to-mesh skinning feature in 4.14 is messing up all my cloth objects.

[I_Create_Art]

A new 4.14 feature has taken over previous method of adding apex cloth to skeletal mesh with very negative results of some of us: Improved Apex Cloth Skinning Mesh-to-Mesh

(edited)
Alright so this new feature is very cool but it’s completely messing up all my cloth objects because my cloth objects aren’t the same as the original meshes so it can’t skin them, I’d prefer the previous method of adding cloth objects were the mesh is totally replaced rather than skinned, this new feature is totally against my workflow. Please tell me there is a way to disable it and/or revert back to using the imported mesh instead of skinning the present 1. I believe many other people are experiencing the same problem because of this, I’ve seen some posts with no solution in the answerhub. I really don’t want to have re-import all my characters again with matching meshes, or go back to 4.13.

[Exelcior]

Hi,

I just wanted to drop in and explain why we replaced the method of extracting the APEX geometry in 4.14. We noticed a while back that a lot of materials wouldn’t render correctly. We’d see inverted normal maps in some places, and effects that relied on accurate binormals/tangents would fail on some parts of the mesh. When we looked into the extracted data we saw that while the normals were correct, the binormals and tangents weren’t consistent in the .apx file.

So we made the decision to no longer rely on the APEX data and only use the known correct render data we already had in Unreal. This has a few more benefits than just fixing our materials. We can guarantee everything matches up as we use the same verts. We can change the character mesh easily and just re-bind the simulation mesh to the new geometry. We essentially have the setup now for arbitrary wrap deformation in the engine, we aren’t quite there yet but this is the groundwork to allow it in future.

There’s obviously trade-offs when doing something like this, so now as we favour the character geometry the expected workflow would be to author clothing data in the character file to always keep the character geo in sync with the clothing data. We also are no longer able to use latch groups in the DCC tool as the latch data is not available to us when we bind the sim mesh to the geometry. In future this change will allow us to do more and more inside the editor so we can rely less on the APEX DCC plugins and Clothing Tool.

Hopefully this explains with more detail why we made this change and that we’re hoping in the long term to create a more unified workflow within Unreal.

Thanks,

Benn.

[I_Create_Art]

@Exelcior;641530

Hi,

I just wanted to drop in and explain why we replaced the method of extracting the APEX geometry in 4.14. We noticed a while back that a lot of materials wouldn’t render correctly. We’d see inverted normal maps in some places, and effects that relied on accurate binormals/tangents would fail on some parts of the mesh. When we looked into the extracted data we saw that while the normals were correct, the binormals and tangents weren’t consistent in the .apx file.

So we made the decision to no longer rely on the APEX data and only use the known correct render data we already had in Unreal. This has a few more benefits than just fixing our materials. We can guarantee everything matches up as we use the same verts. We can change the character mesh easily and just re-bind the simulation mesh to the new geometry. We essentially have the setup now for arbitrary wrap deformation in the engine, we aren’t quite there yet but this is the groundwork to allow it in future.

There’s obviously trade-offs when doing something like this, so now as we favour the character geometry the expected workflow would be to author clothing data in the character file to always keep the character geo in sync with the clothing data. We also are no longer able to use latch groups in the DCC tool as the latch data is not available to us when we bind the sim mesh to the geometry. In future this change will allow us to do more and more inside the editor so we can rely less on the APEX DCC plugins and Clothing Tool.

Hopefully this explains with more detail why we made this change and that we’re hoping in the long term to create a more unified workflow within Unreal.

Thanks,

Benn.

Thanks A lot for the reply and the explanation, changed my workflow a bit and redid a few things so I’ve got everything working now. Its a bit more difficult to avoid errors with the new way of doing things but I guess at the end of the day we’ll be able to reap its benefits

[iniside]

Any ETA when cloth editor will be available in Unreal ? Even some kind of experimental version. Like this year, or it has been pushed back ?

[Exelcior]

@iniside;648987

Any ETA when cloth editor will be available in Unreal ? Even some kind of experimental version. Like this year, or it has been pushed back ?

An experimental cloth editor just went out with the 4.16 preview. You’ll need to enable it in the experimental settings and it’s not quite production ready yet, but it will give you a sneak peek at how we’re going to handle cloth editing in Unreal.