if I set my black pearls skeletal mesh to use cloth physics,even with only the top flag and not any of the sails active I get a 40 fps drop in the frame rate.2 ships in the scene will drop the frame rate to around 16.
if I attach separate flags instead of part of the actual mesh I get no frame rate drop with many more simulations going on.
is this normal?im sure people have used cloth on characters without this level of performance drops.
I think ive read that depending on how you use it,the cloth simulation in udk tends to get heavy.If it was for the cape of a character i supose its ok but looking at some of the characters that cobalt uses(like the hair),i think this is a soft body or maybe a baked simulation as a ready animation in max/maya?
If you dont manage to pull of some decent cloth in udk i suspose the best option woud be a animated cloth in max or a shader that simulates wind with some paralax maybe?
Look at the begining of this video of star wars battlefront
Looking at the cloth that is covering the crates,the way it moves,i think this is a shader thing.
ive made the sails a separate skeletal mesh and attach it to the ship at the start of the level and its running at 120 fps in the editor.i was getting some jumpiness but that turned out to be because I was running the game at slomo 0.3.after adjusting the scale of the ship and setting the gamespeed to 1 the problem has all but gone away.still tweeking,but its looking pretty good.
I did try vertex anim with world position offset in the material but the skeletal mesh would not accept it-to many instructions although it works well on a static mesh.
I have no experience with the engine cloth, I’m using Apex. It’s slow, for example the hair of the girl (1000 triangles) is adding about 0.5 ms to the cpu stats. It’s not very useful to use in a lot of characters at the same time, but I think that for the ship may work fine.
thanks for the info.engine cloth is working great now.