Apex Cloth

An Apex Cloth Behavior (beApexCLoth) allows to simulate any Nvidia Apex cloth asset that was configured on the Character File. The Apex Cloth Asset can be generated with the Nvidia Maya DCC plugin for physX 3.4 which is available on the Golaem download website
 
 
 

Creation

  • Behavior Editor / Behavior Library:
  • Golaem Menu: Crowd Behaviors / Behaviors / CrowdBeApexCloth Node
  • MEL command: glmCrowdBeApexClothCmd;

Configuration

An Apex Cloth Behavior defines the following specific attributes. For common attributes see Behavior Common Attributes.
There is full tutorial explaining the use of Apex Cloth here.

Cloth Attributes

Cloth Meshes

List of meshes asset to simulate with apex cloth. Several mesh asset can be specified by separating them with a comma (,). All the mesh assets must be listed as Meshes in the Geometry Tab of the relative Character File, and should have a Cloth Asset File correctly configured.
The button on the right end is a helper with a list of all mesh assets present in currently loaded entity type. Use it to easier the configuration.
Gravity Scale Gravity scale to use for the apex file
In Rigid Bodies

List of Crowd Rigid Bodies to use as colliders for the cloth.

Limits:

  • box primitives have to be considered as a 6 faces convex hull
  • a maximum of 32 faces per convex hull can be used

You can use the Vertex Limit configuration in the Crowd Rigid Body to try to lower the number of faces of the convex hulls.
Freeze Cloth On Stop If checked, the cloth will keep the shape it has when the stop trigger is set true. To go back to the skinned version of the cloth, it will be needed to start again a cloth behavior and stop it without this option checked.
Frozen Cloth Bone When the Freeze Cloth On Stop option is checked, this allows to freeze the cloth relative to the given bone rather than in world space

Note that meshes can be filtered by the asset repartition on the Entities Rendering Types. In such a case, the clothes will only be simulated on the entities that get the cloth objects.

Every mesh asset named in the "Clothing asset" list must exists in the Character File (.gcha).

Material Override Attribute

The following parameters allow to override the value stored within the loaded .apx file

The Physical Material parameters are the same than these from the official Nvidia Apex Clothing node. Please check the Physx plugin documentation for more details

Wind Attributes

Wind Adaption

The rate of adaption. The higher this value, the faster the cloth reaches the wind velocity. Set to 0 to turn off wind
Wind Velocity The target velocity each vertex tries to achieve. This attribute can be animated / keyframed.
Wind Velocity Noise

Per entity noise added to the base Wind Velocity. Noise is computed randomly for each entity (within -noise and + noise on each axis), and remain the same for the whole duration of the simulation.

 

Starting / StoppingAttributes

Starting Duration The duration that it take for the cloth to switch from fully skinned to fully simulated
Stopping Duration The duration that it take for the cloth to switch from fully simulated to fully skinned