Creating Swappable Apex Cloth

Development World Creation
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1

Hi
I wanted to is it possible to create swappable apex cloth that player can change it and choose from his inventory?(Like GTA V or Witcher 3)
If so what options do we have?

2

I would try it like this:

  • Make all clothes as separate meshes, skinned to the same skeleton as your character.
  • Export character and clothes in separate files.
  • Import Character in UE4. Then, import the clothes files using the same Skeleton UE4 created for the character.
  • Make only one AnimationBlueprint. Since it’s based on a specific Skeleton, it’ll work for the Character and it’s Clothes, as they’re sharing the same Skeleton.
  • Make your Character Blueprint with SkeletalMeshComponents for the Character and each cloth.
  • Change the SkeletalMesh of the clothes’ SkeletalMeshComponents as the player is choosing among them.
  • Keep both Character and Clothes AnimationBlueprints variables synchronized so character and clothes animate the same way. To make things neater, I would create an array containing all their AnimationBlueprints and every time I’d have to change something, I’d use a foreach loop in such array.

Hope it helps. =)

3

Thanks for the detailed answer RVillani

4

Rvilani, why not use setmaster pose to keep all the animations in sync ?

5

Yes , Since I was using Mixamo Fuse for my characters , I exported each parts separately and use the player rig for all of them to attach the clothes to him.

6

Because I didn’t know about it! LOL

Of course, now that I read about it, it’s WAAAAY better than arrays and variables synchronization!

7

OK so your next challenge is to get Apex cloth colliding with the “body” mesh. I have found this tricky.

I have collision capsules defined in the “body” mesh, but the clothes won’t collide with it :frowning:

Happy to share my experiences.

W_Jones

8

The clothes have to be skinned with the collision meshes. Not the character. Apex will only collide with hulls on it’s own skeleton.

To make them with the correct size, I’d skin everything inside the same scene, on a single skeleton, then, as the PhysX plugin exports everything in the scene, I’d save one copy of this scene for each cloth and, on each file, delete the character and the other clothes.

The skeleton with the collision hulls would be correct for exporting the .apb and, inside UE4, the clothes would appear to collide with the character.