A few things considering the Post-4.16 Clothing Solver

So Hello’s to everyone here,

I want to give some feedback on the new APEX Clothing Solver and it’s parameters.

As I’ve just recently switched to UE 4.17 from 4.14 I had to mess a bit with the new Clothing Solver.
First of all: Why is literally every Clothing Piece behaving stretchy? In 4.14 It behaved exactly as it does while authoring the APEX Asset in 3ds Max but now in 4.17 all clothing assets that didn’t had any stretching in 4.14 now look like some kind of rubber-like cloth due to the stretching. Cranking up the Solver Frequency reduces the stretching but also makes the Cloth extremely stiff, which makes it look a quite weird while moving if you want to simulate more lightweight materials.

Even further this stretching can cause some weird graphical result because the vertex normals seem to a bit messed up if you are using a custom shading method in the material graph (in my case I am faking an anisotropic material via the material graph. Btw.: anyone who knows how to expose the anisotropic gradient from the Hair Shader into a node with some parameters? ). Did I miss any kind of parameter that fixes these stretchiness or is this supposed to be like this?

There’s also a weird bug if you are removing an Cloth asset from a mesh section (might only affect imported cloth assets, haven’t tested this any further). After removing it the Skeletal Mesh gets completely messed up and requires to be reimported.

And last but not least: Is there finally any way to get some kind of simple clothing collision with the Map’s Environment?

Greetings RRe36