Hi all,
I’m building a character for my game: a god-like figure in a floor-length hooded robe with long, wide hanging sleeves. When he moves, the fabric has to move with himn as naturally as possible.
I’ve spent two days trying to get it, and I’m stuck. Not “it’s broken”, it simulates, and standing still the robe hangs beautifully. It just never looks right the moment he walks. Every setting I change trades one problem for another, which is making me suspect I took a wrong turn early rather than mis-tuned something late.
The short version of what I did:
In Blender: rigged with Auto-Rig Pro. The robe mesh itself isn’t clean enough to simulate directly, so I built dedicated low-poly quad cages for the skirt and both sleeves to serve as the simulation mesh, gave them a proper flat pattern, and skinned them. The render robe stays untouched and gets deformed by the cages.
In UE 5.8: a physics asset for body collision, then a Chaos Cloth Asset whose Dataflow graph merges the cages (sim) with the robe (render), a painted MaxDistance map anchoring it at the waist and shoulders, driven by a Chaos Cloth Component over a walk cycle.
It runs. It just doesn’t behave like cloth: the skirt moves in ways fabric doesn’t, and the sleeves are worse.
So before I burn another two days tuning: is the sim-cage approach the right one for a garment like this? Has anyone here done a full-length robe with long hanging sleeves in Chaos Cloth? I’d really like to hear how you’d structure it, because I have a strong feeling I’m fighting the system instead of using it.
Happy to post the graph, the settings, or video of the failure, just tell me what would help.
Thanks!
