I want to simulate a thick latex/rubber mask. I am using the Clothing Tool Properties to adjust the materials, and am using the rubber material found in the Content Examples project, but it’s not thick enough. Any recommendations on how to get the mask to be thicker?
Hi @Peteman12
Welcome back to the forums!
I think that using a thicker/stiffer material such as latex or rubber to simulate using Chaos Cloth is not going to be trivial as the default cloth settings will likely behave as lighter materials.
But before anything else, let me ask what is your engine version? (UE 5.2, 5.4, 5.5, etc.)
I’m curious, what specific characteristic do you think it is not thick enough? Is it that it bends/flops like silk or that it’s penetrate through the character mesh because the collision thickness is too low?
Are you using Chaos Cloth with custom iteration counts? Usually, increasing the substeps/iterations of the ChaosClothSharedSimConfig is one of the most crucial steps in making the cloth act stiff for a heavy/thick material.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Rubber is a soft body. the engine doesn’t really do that.
You can fake it, but it’s not really going to be viable for gamplay or it’s going to have some caviat or another - mostly performance and inaccuracy based because Chaos is inherently trash.
As far as how the clothing paint used to work, you lower the value of the distance the vertices can travel to make it more rigid.
No idea where that would be or what it translates to in rTard Epic Developer speak with the newest UI and all. I’m just giving you the wording based on the Nvidia Cloth standards that Epic copied and screwed up.
I am using 5.4.
Hi @pchernoff thank you for confirming that you are running UE 5.4!
Since Chaos Cloth has replaced NVCloth, adjusting the stiffness of cloth made of relatively thick materials such as latex or rubber cannot be done in the same way as before, but it might be possible to achieve a much stiffer response.
Here is what I would tweak in your Chaos Cloth Shared Sim Config and Cloth Asset properties
1. Increase Edge & Bending Stiffness
In UE 5.4, Chaos Cloth controls fabric rigidity mainly through its property weights:
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Look for Edge Stiffness and Bending Stiffness under your Cloth Config settings
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Try cranking Bending Stiffness up significantly (start around 0.8–1.0), By default, Bending Stiffness of lower values make fabric behave like silk, while higher values force the mesh to be resistant to bending, giving it that thick, rubbery resistance
2. Boost Iterations in ChaosClothSharedSimConfig
If the cloth still feels too soft or “stretchy” even with high stiffness settings, it’s usually because the solver isn’t running enough iterations per frame to enforce those constraints
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Under your shared sim config, look for the substeps and iteration count (Constraint Position Iterations specifically).
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Try bumping your substeps up to 2 or 4, and constraint iterations to 5 or 10. This will make the simulation much stiffer and prevent the rubber from looking like it’s made of sheer fabric.
3. Adjust Max Distance & Collision Offset
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Make sure your Max Distance weight mask is not set to an impossibly high value on places where the mask should barely move. Lowering this value will decrease the max distance the rubber can be stretched away from your base animated mesh.
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Raise the Collision Thickness / Offset slightly to make sure the mask keeps a visual “volume” and does not clip tightly against the characters face.
Epic Documentation:
Clothing Tool Properties Reference
Chaos Cloth Tool Properties Reference
Video:
Quick Chaos Cloth Simulation in UE5 Made Easy | Cloth Paint, Pinning Collision, Brush Workflow