Basically I’m trying to get a cloth simulation with bones or anything else I can use to properly keyframe the animation for use in unreal engine. Does anyone have a method for this?
Hi PhiuxDev.
I never tried this method directly myself but know for certain it was used by others I knew working in games company’s I was at. Specifically it was used a lot if I remember rightly, for characters with cloaks.
The method I heard of was to have two versions say of a cloak. The first one would be the cloth sim version. The second one would be boned and skinned and part of the whole baked character rig. The version you export out.
The basic idea was to link the bones to the surface of the deforming cloth so they would move with the simulation and it would drive the animation of the skinned cloak. Then you would bake the animation into the bones and export.
This also had an added advantage in that once the animation was baked you could work over it a bit to smooth out any outstanding errors or glitches.
The example I was given was as a cloak. In this instance you would skin it in a sort of spoke or spider web pattern in line with the flattened spread cloak mesh before the cloth sim is applied. Then position and orient constrain the bases of each bone ( which would of course be parented in FK ) to nodes attached to the faces of the cloth mesh.
The original example I was given was in 3DS Max which used a surface constraint with a dummy object for the attach node. I guess in Blender you would be using empty’s as the attach nodes with copy location and orientation constraints referencing vertex groups of four vertices for each individual face ?
There might be other ways than this, perhaps even simpler. But this was what I always understood was the straight forward nuts and bolts, artist / animator friendly version. As opposed to anything custom scripted or a specific feature of an engine.
Anyway I’m sure others can pitch in. I never tried this sort of thing in Blender yet.
All the best…
Why not use cloth simulation in Unreal? Which version of Unreal are we talking about, by the way?