Of all the things Unreal is really strong at and have been improving on over the last two years, the progression of realistically simulating cloth physics in-engine is NOT one of them. The introduction of the “ClothAsset” as a new way to use Chaos Cloth sims on characters was exciting to me at first as i could put some nicely simulated clothes on my Metahumans but this still has a long way to go. I My goal was to be able to take garments created and simulated in Marvelous Designer and apply them to a Metahuman BP to be simulated with whatever animation I apply to it via sequencer for cinematics. Following this tutorial: Chaos Panel Cloth - Editor Walkthrough and Updates (5.4).
Firstly, the Panel Cloth or “ClothAsset” Editor doesnt really work for complex garments or full outfits, or anything besides a simple shirt or basic cloth material. The whole point of using Marvelous is to get realistic cloth simulations. So when you export then bring it into UE5 as a ClothAsset and have to repaint the weights, this just disregards all the nice cloth simulations you get from MD and have to paint them again which doesnt give you anywhere near the same result. Even including “Include garments simulation data” doesnt really mean anything if I have to repaint the weights to tell Unreal where to simulate the cloth. Epic kind of baited us here with this. Why am i repainting weights when I did all of that in another software already? Is there no way to just simulate all the exact same data it received from Marvelous when I exported as a USD? Isnt that what all those nodes are for?
There is also a ton of bugs in this feature.
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In the weight painting node if you hold right click and WASD to navigate around the viewport to paint the parts of your garment that you want to simulate, for some reason your brush settings change everytime you move around, changing the brush size, from ‘Paint’ to ’ Smooth’, changing the atttribute value… WTF? This makes it really difficult to keep painting consistent and easy to do.
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At times, I will open my unreal file, navigate to my ClothAsset and when I open the editor, my garment will have completely disappeared, and the only way to get it to reappear is to hit ‘Reimport Render Static Mesh’ and it will appear again, this took me a while to figure out as a real solution because before I was just making completely new ClothAsset files out of ignorance.
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Physics assets are super important for running simulations but when you “Set the Physics Asset” in the SetPhysics Asset Node, the cloth sim no longer conforms to the geometry of your mesh but to the physics asset leaving you with your cloth bulging in random areas as if something is there when its just your physics asset so it no longer drapes and simulates around the geometry of your mesh as it should be. So now youre stuck adjusting the physics asset which promotes an opportunity to create more error or a look that you werent intending, if you want to have some cloth sim but still have a tighter fitting garment. This just doesnt make any sense.
Please let me know if I am not alone in this issue or I am doing something wrong, until then Ill probably stay away from cloth sims in Unreal until it is improved.