UE 5.3 Chaos "Panel Cloth" Clothing Sim Workflow

hey what is up my name is Matt Workman and today I'm going to be checking out Unreal Engine 5.3 and specifically the new clothing workflow for me creating clothing for metahumans is really important I make a video game called cine Tracer 2 and cine Chaser original and that game is made in Unreal Engine 5.2 it has metahumans in it and those metahumans need clothing on top of that I make many human clothing for the Unreal Engine Marketplace that you could check out in the link below I guess and I'm really interested slash concerned that this is going to completely alter the way that I may close so I'm going to just kind of take you through my first impressions first look on this this is not a tutorial I don't know how to do this but I'm going to share some resources that have helped me and kind of just share what I've learned so far and would love to hear and keep a conversation going about this topic for the stated reasons cool so let's just get right into some content examples if you just want to see a quick clip on like what does it look like well here we are in a third person template and there is let me try to get a shot here is Quinn another Quinn running and that is the new clothing component here but there's a lot more to that but if you just wanted to see it moving there it is moving the bottom of the shirt is not only simulating but bouncing as well so it has like some spring stuff happening and then the sleeves are moving too now I have made clothing uh recently for 5.1 for 5.2 for Medi humans where like say like the bottom of the jacket is simulating or there's like a cape or some straps something like that those are my most popular outfits on the marketplace they all have chaos cloth stuff in them but this is different this is more like a full saw that would be coming out of like Marvelous Designer or Vellum from Houdini or ncloth from Maya except in Unreal Engine so let's look a little bit closer at it again I am brand new to this I am singing for the first time pretty much today but I was excited by it and it's again really relevant for my work so we look at this scene here and it's just a straight up skeletal mesh in the map there's no blueprint for it but what's new is that under it uh parented under the skeletal mesh component here is a chaos cloth component that's new that's new for me I've I've not heard of that before um so this would normally be with like a metahuman another skeletal mesh that would have a control rig and an animation blueprint that would be like hey like follow the pose of the body among other things that could that's normally happening there uh in this case it's a dedicated chaos cloth component and uh again that's new it's not a skeletal mesh component and what we have here is a cloth asset which if we change this cloth asset to a long sleeve shirt we see that that is the mechanism to change the visual and the simulation so normally again it was like a skeletal mesh component and then you would point it at a different skeletal mesh that is not the case here that is very new I'm afraid of the future and what that means for my workflows now I don't know exactly what's Happening Here uh there's a bunch of different versions of glow cloth Sim um and so this looks to be like a full cloth Sim again like it's the whole thing is simulating and it's a little slow I don't know what frame rate but it's probably not meant to be used like this and again this is like version 0.0 one of the plugins is it's really early uh immediately the wrist is ripping out and this is also [Music] fairly slow I wouldn't say it's like you would put this in like a game or something like that but there's a chance that this is the one that's meant for cinematic there's a bunch of different types I'm not sure I have them all organized in my head but I'll do my best to say what I think they are but anyway uh this shows like kind of the setup difference if you're like a developer and you're working with this stuff now again skeletal chaos cloth component pointing to a um clothing asset as actually I believe what it's called so importantly how do you get these assets where is this stuff how do you get started with this so the first thing you need to do is uninstall uninstall I need to uninstall the other versions of Unreal Engine 5 I have I need some hard drive space back but uh you're going to install Unreal Engine 5.3 the normal way from the launcher and then you need to come to your plugins and you're going to search cloth and there's even more there's the ml deformer stuff which I haven't gotten into yet and I'm not going to really cover because I don't fully understand it I'm going to test it myself in a little bit but you need to load chaos cloth asset chaos cloth asset editor there's also chaos cloth generator and there's a bunch of ml the former ones too that I have not tried out yet so go ahead turn those on restart the editor it says in the tutorial which I'll show you in a second and put the links in the bottom those were big finds that you have to rebuild from Visual Studio I don't believe that's the case I have Visual Studio installed on my computer but I didn't have to do that I just restarted it like normal and it worked fine for me so where are these demo clothing assets I did a little bit of a Google Search and I found this and I'll just link to this in the description below if you want to find it that way or if you search for it on Google Google is pretty good you'll find it it's right here so this is going to be what I followed and uh really good lot very dense a lot to take in this is where you're gonna go download that file and you basically extract everything that's in that place in that zip file here you put that in your content browser start up the project and it's in there good to go I did not have to build from visual studio um like it says here but you might have to I'm not sure I do have it set up so maybe maybe it did do that but anyway this is like uh kind of breaking down what's in the content example I'm gonna go check that out in this video as well and this is worth a read many times over I've read it a bunch of times and I'm like every time I see something new I'd say the next most important one here which you can find it by going to this tutorial and clicking it or I'll also link this this is what I'm working my way through now whole bunch of stuff of things you can do here and a very very long workflow video or a video that's what I'm making or um kind of written form like how to author uh these type of assets from scratch so I'm going to start right here my normal workflow for making clothes is to go to Marvelous Designer do this make cloth panels simulate it against a metahuman body but from there I have to go to Maya I retuple it can I change some UVS I'm going to do some hard surface modeling sometimes to it depends on the outfit right I mean if it's like a space spice the spacesuits could be but if it's like something hard surface like armor I just modeled that the normal way I then go to zbrush make a high poly sculpt it bake the high poly low poly substance designer um substance painter workflows there and then I rig it skin paint it in Maya that's my normal workflow but let me show you what they're saying the workflow is for this for now this is probably not final this is just what I understood so far so I thought that you would actually author these cloth panels in Unreal Engine that may be coming but in this case it's saying that you would generate these in a DCC like Marvelous Designer so you do the normal workflow here and the main difference is that or the the specifics here is that you're going to export one version that is thick which is kind of new that's the stock uh distance there thickness I think thick and um I think by that nature it is welded so that's the one that's going to render and then you're also going to export a thin welded version because usually I have to go well these verts back together in Maya a blender is somewhere and that's this simulation version so there's two versions and the render version has some like internal seams um which is interesting and the uh simulation the thin version that gets welded doesn't doesn't have any details that's probably makes it easier to solve they said that the particle distance like the density kind of like the quality of the cloth and marvelous if you do marvelous you should know what that means but the uh the render one was uh 12 density for the shirt five for the collar because like smaller pieces of clothing more density to like bends and then for the simulation version it's much coarser 20 is the default usually so they sent it out at 18 for the shirt 10 for the collar these are probably just like jump off points I'm sure the density has nothing to do with performance later then you're going to load the um the plugins in I'm just gonna like kind of fly through this and kind of talk about like what I see gonna make a new asset a clothing asset brand new and then there is a data flow asset and um that's brand brand new for this and then from this point I'm going to go look at this in editor two but just walk into the tutorial is that you're going to point to the skeletal mesh that you're putting this clothing on that you probably should have been using in Marvelous Designer and to the static mesh from uh Marvelous Designer is what looks like what's happening now there's this whole node-based workflow on like what to do with these assets so one of them is like importing it this feels like Shake or like Nuke if you've ever worked with like 2D node based compositors it's kind of the same thing but one of them is like okay imported mesh so this this is a new concept is to have a graph for the workflow Unreal Engine I haven't done anything like that PCG is a little bit like this too this is very unrelated five type of workflow here um and you're going to bring in the meshes and they're all represented by nodes you're going to bring them together you're going to do your transfer skin weights which that's like Maya's superpower for me that's what I'm mostly doing in Maya among other like things and then there's going to be a node that says like here's how you configure the um settings this is like regular chaos cloth authoring as it exists now and then there's more things you keep going uh I have not done this forward for myself I'm going to test this on my workflow with metahumans very soon but just so excited and wanted to like you know get the conversation started about this workflow and just kind of share it get more people into it I know that if I see a YouTube video on it even if it says like rambly as this one and not instructional that I'm more likely to get into it there's a lot more settings I'm not even there's there's a lot more we're going to go look at it in engine in a second I'm just going to keep going all the way to the bottom that is for like simulating an engine there's a whole other workflow where you take that cloth and you ml machine learning deformer train it that's completely different that is linked somewhere else I'll also link this that is this workflow that's another very long document but this is probably what we use in Gamers the other one might be um something that you end up caching and using more for like cinematics I don't quite know the line the division yet but I'll be learning that as time goes on so that's like a very long just like oh you read the tutorial online that's what I did you know and that's how I've learned it links to those in the description so getting back to the sample project here we are in the sample map if we go look at the example content that they give us it says cloth we have animations this is just her running and this is like a huge crazy range of motion test I guess I'll just open it uh and I guess that's like a ROM a range of motion from mocap or for like testing skinning but I don't I don't know what this is I don't know how they made this but this is how you train the ml deformer but I'm not getting into that today that's um One Step too far for me high level the new cloth assets cloth asset not clothing and its corresponding data flow graph each one this one goes with this one this one goes this way I'm going to open those a second the map some materials which look like they didn't come in correctly and I don't know if I have this correct yet now there's two physics assets so this is this is spicy for sure we have this skeletal mesh this would be like the med human based body for me we have an ml shirt machine learning shirt that's a skeletal mesh then we have one that's an ml shirt static mesh a regular just shirt static mesh not skinned is interesting and then um one for simulating so that would be the thin one and one for I'm not sure what transfer means one of these is thick for rendering that might be this one let me open it and take a peek which my space mouse was hooked up ah this has thickness which is very very interesting to actually export it with thickness that changes a lot of my workflow this whole thing changes my entire clothing workflow so that's the thick version from marvelous in theory and this is the thin one this one is for simulating this is how I would have to author cloth for the old way of making cloth Sims for many human clothes um so those are the meshes now there's two physics assets and they did a really good setting these up the really good job setting this up this is hard to set up the physics assets like this this is what like the real-time cloth is normally colliding with it's tough to set it up like this so I kind of hope they do this for the med humans for us or I will continue to struggle to try to do that there's also one for lsv oof and this one's heavy and I'm not gonna lie I don't know what this is for but there's a much higher quality one this may be for like cinematic caching maybe the ml the former uses this I'm not sure I haven't gone through that tutorial yet you can't open this unless you do something so I haven't opened it I don't know what it is but those are the assets that come with it and so if we've been doing this from scratch which I'm going to attempt to do in the future very near future as this might be how I might close now is that you would make a clothing asset and you're going to get a data flow graph so let's open up their clothing asset for the T-shirt so pretty interesting right here is that this thing is just solving and it's stretchy I can't like I don't think I can grab it maybe there's a shortcut for grabbing it but I can't like interact with it like it's Marvelous Designer so I did find this I'm just going to pause it hopefully so in here we would point it to a skeleton to the physics asset so this is going to collide against a physics acid just like chaos cloth does now for metahumans or any skeletal mesh I suppose and it's like oh where's the rest of this stuff well to my understanding that's these nodes down here so like that tutorial said you have a static mesh import where here's where you define the simulated static mesh we have another import this is the thin or sorry the thick version that you're going to render so this gets simulated and then that animation I imagine the reverts I have no idea you simulate the thin one and then it's going to render this one somehow some proxy workload they said that echo's scarf was doing that too I'd never noticed that uh we're merging those together we're going to transfer the skin weights from Quinn from the skeletal mesh that would be again from my meta human bass body normally there's a bunch of settings and then we have a bunch of weight maps that I don't know what's happening here I don't know if they'll like hand painted them or something like that some simulation settings some backstop settings probably like against the Avatar that you're colliding against and then there's a bunch of spring configs and what's this some custom selections of verts probably and uh very non-destructive very node based that's cool and then it terminates like this it kind of reminds you of PCG except for clothes this is a it's a pretty cool workflow um I can't say that I've understand it just yet but you know if you want to see the panels there here and I did mess around with like being able to select this and stuff like this but I'm gonna break something oh that just made a selection node this might be broken now we probably just don't do that but that's generally what's happening in here again I'm going to try this again with many humans but um just looking through it the first time a little overwhelming but also pretty cool and it turns out this is like a view of this I believe which I just added like a random selection node I don't know if that's gonna like break anything I also don't know if you have to like export anything from this um and I did quickly look at the ml deformer version of this because like that seems like the cool way of doing runtime versions I'm mostly interested in in the game use not the Cinematic use but I think the workflows are really similar here it does show that like eventually you you change the workflow a little bit to do the ml deformer I got a little lost I haven't done ml the former but luckily this Emerald former self training happens in engine because it used to happen in Maya before and I was like I use my app every day but that doesn't mean I know how to use the ml the former plugin over there it's kind of I use Maya for like very specific things so like even like these other things that it can do for me I'm like a little I'm like Ah that's a lot so it's kind of cool that it's going to happen here and I wonder if we're also going to be able to like alter the clothing in here as well like all of the patterns for now it seems like you're doing that in uh Marvelous Designer still which is my comfort zone anyway so I'm okay with that workflow so that is a quick overview of where to go get the content I think that's important and if you just wanted to like scrub through and just see someone like what assets are in there what does this new workflow look like hey we have a chaos cloth component there's a cloth asset with a data graph where you like kind of PCG your clothing workflow and basically the stuff that was like entirely in Maya for me rigging uh combined with like setting up the clothing the cloth as it's the old way there's a name for it like the Legacy cloth editor or something like that um it's done here in a lot more visual modular and looks like non-destructive way and it seems like they're putting a lot of effort into this which is really cool and I would say that around half of my time as a developer is making clothes for metahumans so this has a huge implication for me I think that for a while at least a year I imagine I'll keep making clothes the old way Marvelous Designer Maya substance painter Maya again for rigging and they're just static mesh components that sometimes a little bit of that steady mesh component will have cloth this is a whole different thing where like that same cloth asset will work for runtime now if it's that whole shirt that might be too much for runtime um it might be ml deformer runtime which is hopefully more performant and has like less variable cloth but it's trained from like you know real cloth simulation but then also the Cinematic version of it right so like it's different like every time it's determine it but like you know it's not like predefined like an ml the former would be so there's definitely a value there for someone where like okay I make this clothing asset and I can go into like the three different directions right regular Sim chaos Sim ml Sim or um high quality some something like that cash I think it's like a cash workflow from like Vellum like a limit cache except you do it like right in engine so it's probably not alembic anymore it's probably just whatever native format but that seems to be like the big thing there is that you can then author for the three different workflows if you're only doing static mesh or skeletal mesh component which is like the way I do it and say like most of the cloth doesn't want to be simmed because it's you know that's heavy even if this gets performant it's heavy to simcloth um you can still do it that way but this seems like you know a way to get all three at once and then the most interesting thing will be that if we can actually design the clothes here make the patterns stitch them together I mean they have to like remake Marvelous Designer like a lot of the features I know that blender has and there's other apps that can kind of do that too I guess they probably could as well but uh very exciting for me terrifying as well because it's like completely changes my changes my workflow but there's probably no huge rush it's going to be a little bit maybe 5.6 I don't know when we think this would be like production ready and I would like use it in like my game or something like that but um pretty exciting I'm glad to see the focus on clothing I mean it's like again 50 of like well I focus on is like metahumans and like making clothes for them so that's really cool to see progress in it and um any questions I probably don't know the answers but I am going to be probably live streaming using this a little bit I live stream on this YouTube channel that's just like part of my process is developing now and um trying to get this to work with metahumans and like can I make a shirt I'm gonna make like I don't know some sort of jacket or something like that and do this whole workflow maybe not the ml the former just yet but do this workflow for say like the mail tell normal meta human that's like what I usually start with uh we will see if I do learn how to do this better I don't really make a lot of videos these days but um either way excited to see this working and I'll check you on the next video peace

Channel: Cinematography Database

Views: 29,463

Keywords: cine tracer, cinetracer, unreal engine, ue4, previz, previs, virtual production, virtual cinematography, chaos cloth, panel cloth, marvelous designer

Id: 8m4l8cuBSLw

Length: 21min 44sec (1304 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023