Apex Cloth Weird Artifacts

I’ve been trying to create a hair simulation using Apex, but it’s been quite a bumpy ride. Most recently I’ve been seeing weird rendering artifacts that seem to happen when several strands of cloth overlap each other:

The artifacts also linger for a bit if I move the camera quickly, making me think it’s somewhat related to Distance Fields. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi DamirH,

At the moment I’m not able to reproduce this on my end with any test cloth assets that I have or have created. I created a simple cloth flag with multiple strands that could overlap but I’m seeing no issues on my end.

In reference to Distance Fields this is not a likely issue since Distance Fields cannot affect Skeletal Meshes currently. They only work with static meshes, this include AO, Shadows, and other forms of Distance Field implementations.

There is likely something that you’ve setup with your cloth asset that is either something in the way it was authored or something in the material. If you just use a base material and nothing else, do you get the same shadowing issues? If the issue is with the mesh you may want to try some tests with basic cloth asset to see what may be going on.

Let me know.

Tim

Hey there Tim,

It shows up with the default material too. If it’ll be helpful I can provide you with the hair asset in question first thing in the morning.

You can send the asset here if you don’t want to post publicly. I’ll have a look when I can and see if I can offer any feedback.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/private.php?do=newpm&u=4894

Just wanted to respond back here since our last brief conversation was in a private message from the forums. I’ve not got a solution for the overlapping triangles shadows other than using a translucent hair material.

You had asked about some of the character work from Epic, and from what I am aware of the characters do not use Apex Cloth for hair simulation. For something like a pony tail this would be boned and simulating physics. There would be some layers of translucent materials with a base mesh that is opaque.

Did you resolve this? I’m having the same problem.