Apex cloth does not collide with objects in the world

Cloth only seems to collide with physics shapes that belong to the same skeleton as the cloth itself. I can’t tell if this is a bug, or a feature that is not yet supported in UE4.

Would love to get some clarification from Epic if this is expected, or if cloth/world collisions are currently not supported.

Thanks

Hi Sandmeister,

This isn’t a bug as you can set this up with your Apex Cloth.

This video here is from an old MMO from 2009 that shows clothing reacting to objects in the environment.

You would need to set this up before being imported into UE4. This would a property of your Apex Cloth. I do not know offhand what you would need to do to set this up but you can find the documentation from Nvidia’s site here.

Thank you!

Tim

Thank you for the reply Tim, I saw that video a while ago which was what made me think it should be possible, even though I could never get it to work. I will keep playing with settings, but are you saying for sure that apex cloth should be able to collide with other objects in the scene that are outside of the skeleton asset the cloth itself belongs to?

Honestly, I’m not sure 100% as anything I’ve particularly done with Apex has been with destructible objects. The Apex documentation above would be a good start to looking into the getting the object to collide with other objects. Also try asking on the Forums in Content Creation as the community may have some tips on how to achieve this as well. I’m sure others have been curious about this as well!

Tim

Just wanted to follow this up by saying I finally got it working. It seems that you need at least one physics capsule on your skeleton in order for collisions to take affect…at leas that is what I am putting it down to for now. Without having the capsule there, physics collisions don’t seem to be processed on the cloth.

I guess it makes sense to have a capsule, it just wasn’t super obvious when I was trying to create a piece of cloth that was completely free to float around with a very high max distance value.

Glad you got it working and thank you for posting your resolution here for others to use that information as well!

Tim

I am trying to understand this but i dont get it. my question is very simlar to this one.
I cant get the cloth to stop going through the ground.
here is what i posted.

Hey Guys,

i knwo this theme is a bit old, but i feel force to answer here. Yesterday is stand infront of a problem, what is near to yours. I had a Net and i want the Net move, when the Player runs through. Like a Curtain.

And i thought yeah cloth could be there right thing for that. But i had the same Problem. Cloth looked nice, but nothing happend with any Collision. I watched the Content Examples, and figured out that the Collision is only on Meshes self, with the Joints. But what i want to do, is that the cloth reacts on a different actor.

the result in the end was, that i dont used cloth, i used a lots of joints and compared with the Skin-Weights i
got nice Results. The first Sphyl i made Kinematic, that it is fixed and the rest is Simulation.

Iam not sure, if this helps anyone. And then you also can add Cloth, for the Mesh moves with the wind + reacts on the player. i think you can do it the other way around, to get the result like in the video.

.

23078-curtain.jpg

greetz Spähling

edit:
of course your mesh need enough edgeloops and vertices. i made 1 edge row, for each joint.

@sandmeister Are you still able to get collisions between cloth and other actors? Things that move etc… I did get collision with a box by adding a capsule (the flag pole), but after changing it’s collision/physics settings, nothing happens. It just collides with it’s pole, going through the ground and any static actors in the scene.

For people who didn’t get it working even after @sandmeister 's solution (like me):
Besides a capsule, it’s required that all your mesh bones (even static ones, like a flag pole) are set to be simulated on the Physics Asset, not kinematic, and for Simulate Physics to be turned on in the level. The collision will only happen against simple collision shapes. Also, it seems to only work against static meshes. For my flag pole I’ve added a box collider so it stands still in the ground.
Hope someone has better solutions.

@Spaehling Great solution for curtains! I’ve used it and works pretty well. Even better if we set some level of clothing in the mesh.

A capsule for the cloth to collide with, inside the apex asset, when you’re authoring the cloth inside Maya or Max.

Hi. I’m sorry, can you specify it a bit? What does it mean to add a capsule? When I import my skeletal mesh, UE4 already generated a separate physical asset for it with lots of capsules for each bone. Is it something different? If yes, how and what capsule should be added? If you could help…