I have a character mesh with body shape morphs to allow for customization; such as body size, muscle size, etc. I have clothing modeled to fit the base mesh without morphs being applied. What would be the best work-flow to have that clothing morph when the player changes their body shape?
I’m trying to avoid having to create morphs for all the clothing which would get very time consuming. Ideally I would like to use APEX cloth, but I’m not sure if I can leverage that system to have the cloth use the base mesh as a collider. Are there any other suggestions or solutions I could try?
I have this working in Unity using Megaifers Wrap, which is nice since I dont have to weight or morph my clothing, it does it automatically. But I would rather use Unreal Engine since most of the functionality I need for my game is built in; such as vehicles and networking for multiplayer.
I suppose that the cloth is rigged to the skeletal rig, right?
What you can do is to set ( depends what software you’re using, but doable ) a push/shrink operator which will be linked to the morph target value, so whenever you modify the morph target of the body the cloth will follow based on the morph target value…basically you’re setting morph targets, but it does everything automatically.
Anyway I suggest you to take a look at Apex, it will do the job for you
I guess you could use an operator inside UE4 to modify the geometry, but if you know how to do that inside Maya I suggest to setup this push/shrink directly inside Maya then export…
Maybe I didn’t fully get the question, but you need it dinamically ( in-game? ) or you just want to setup different characters and be able to fit the cloths without adjusting each time the morph targets for the cloth?
If you need it to be dynamic maybe the best solution would be to try do that inside Blueprints ( sorry, no advices on which node to use ) , otherwise, if its a trick to have different characters, do everything inside Maya then export, its your best bet
What I’d like to accomplish is to allow a player design their character using morphs and bones translation/scaling, and then have their chosen clothing automatically fit their character mesh. It would have to be dynamic since they can choose a variety of clothing and it would conform to their character changes they made.
Inside the AnimBlueprint you need to look for the ModifyBone SkeletalControl, which allows for full scale/translate/rotation of the bones, which you can then link to a slider.
Since the slider will have a min-max that value will also affect the scale/translation/rotation of the cloth itself, so you’re modifying two meshes with a single operation.
For scale, translation and rotation the weighting on the mesh will do the job for you for both the character and the cloth, but for the “skinny/fat” component I suggest you to set it up inside Maya ( kinda like the push/shrink operator mentioned before ) and export it inside UE4…basically a morph target
A quicker and better solution without any extra work would be to use Apex for some of the cloths ( trench, skirts and so on ) while use standard weighting for shirts, jeans, and so on…
Yeah, sadly APEX clothing won’t work with different dynamic objects right now. If the clothing was done for the mesh, it can collide with itself, but not with other dynamic objects, which is needed in your case because you want to reuse the same clothing.
I think what Nicolas3D suggest sounds good. Hope that works.
