UE5.4, MarvelousDesigner, Kinematic Collision - Best method for complex clothing + Attachments?

Development Character & Animation
1

Hey all,

I’m looking to create a VERY complex character outfit that I want to run in Unreal. I’m intentionally pushing the limits and have contingency plans to use other software like Cinema4D if needed.

My overall goals:

  • I don’t want to use Alembic caches from Marvelous Designer, that’s easy.
  • I want this to IDEALLY be working for real-time (big ask) but bare minimum be able to render out cached cinematics
  • Have lots of layered geometry that collides with itself, the character, and the environment

I recently followed the guides here to achieve basic working results, but now I want to push the limits:
Panel Cloth - Editor Walkthrough & Updates (5.4)
Create your Clothing Asset in Unreal Engine

Here is what I’m working with. This is only the sim mesh for testing, but so far the results have been poor.

Here it is pre-sim:

Heretic_ClothingTest_v005_SimulationTestInit
Heretic_ClothingTest_v005_SimulationTestInit396×587 38.6 KB

Here we see during an idle sim with no interaction from me it clips pretty quickly:

Heretic_ClothingTest_v005_SimulationTestNoMovement
Heretic_ClothingTest_v005_SimulationTestNoMovement395×581 41.1 KB

And after moving it around, it clips a lot:

Heretic_ClothingTest_v005_SimulationTestPostMovement
Heretic_ClothingTest_v005_SimulationTestPostMovement402×598 54.6 KB

I’ve separated all of the layers with appropriate selections and I’m using Kinematic Collider for the body. The issue seems to be more about the inability to simulate this much complexity well. I played around with the iteration settings in the SimulationSolverConfig settings, and some thickness settings in SimulationSelfCollisionConfig without much improvement. I don’t care about performance much, but rather just want it to work at all:

Heretic_ClothingTest_v005_DataflowGrapht
Heretic_ClothingTest_v005_DataflowGrapht1210×1289 210 KB

I know that this clipping for example is causing some of the issues, but does anyone know of the optimal tradeoff with mesh density and performance? I reduced the poly count a lot, but then this kind of clipping is almost inevitable:
Clipping

LowPolyMesh
LowPolyMesh1632×1128 345 KB

Is it possible to apply sockets to Chaos Cloth? Should I use a combination of cable actors and cloth? Can Chaos Cloth even interact with other elements like that?

A potential solution I’m thinking of is to only use the larger cloth items in MD, and have the draping cable-like pieces be something else, but not sure what the best way to do that is. (or if it’s even possible.)

Any advice on how to improve this work flow?