So I am making a character for a video game using blender and I have come to a crossroads, Basically I have my characters shape done, he has his assets, shield, helmet, sword etc. Now I am wondering if I should add clothing like make meshes and apply the clothing physics to them or if I should just design the shape & body in a way along with material coloring that simulates clothing. I would naturally want to actually make the clothing separately but I dont know how it will act in the game engine, Im using unity if that helps anyone help me. Im just wondering if actually having the cloth will be too much for the game to handle or if possibly when game engines use models they just take all of the actions as a string of images so it wont matter. Thanks guys!
Unity won’t use the Blender Cloth physics. You can use the cloth physics to create shapes for Unity, though. Unity has its own in-game cloth sim, but I think that’s restricted to the fully licensed ($$) version, as are other advanced features.
Whether to make you clothing separate from the main character mesh depends on whether or not the character will ever change outfits. If he/she will always wear the same thing, no need to create separate clothing meshes. You can even use the cloth sim without making fully separate clothes, just use pinning to restrict the effect of the cloth physics, and make special collision meshes for doing the simmed part…
Okay, thanks I now know almost all i need to know, My character is not going to be changing clothes so I can do the pinning as you mentioned but the real question i’m asking is will it work in unity, blerg kind of confusing, if I make a character and say he has a cape for argument sake and in blender i use cloth physics and use that in animating my character, say he runs with his weapon and all that and the cape flys behind him, when unity interprets the blend file or FBX file will it see the cape moving how it looks in blender? or will the character just run and the cape just be completely static on the character, kind of like how i was mentioning earlier if it will actually take the pieces of the blend file and interpret them on the fly, aka super slow, or will it just take the animation from blender making it act like a string of images? Thanks again for the reply
Blender’s Cloth physics records the simulation data in a cache that is not exported with FBX afaik, so you will lose the cloth sim motion in Unity. But you can convert cloth sim motion to shapekeys which can be exported to Unity.
Oh so essentially permanently apply the physics from the cloth sim using shape keys so it looks like an organic flow of cloth but it is actually static.
If it’s animated, it’s not static, regardless of the kind of process used to create the motion. All animation boils down to change over time. Static is just the opposite, no change with time.