Different ways of simulating clothes

There are different ways of setting up cloth simulation on Golaem characters. The main difference between them is the speed, quality of simulation and ease of setup. 

This page provides an overview of each method and redirect on detailed tutorials.

Nvidia Apex Cloth Simulation

The Apex Cloth Simulation provides the best compromise between quality, ease of setup and performance.

Pros & Cons:

  • Quality: Apex simulation provides very good results, especially when dealing with collisions where other methods may fail
  • Ease of setup: wether relying on the automatic mode or on the Nvidia tool, the setup is relatively easy to do
  • Performance: Apex simulation is way faster than nCloth simulation. However it is still slower than the other methods replaying baked simulation 

For an example of using a pre-configured asset (flags in CharacterPack), see Adding Flags

To learn how to create a custom Apex asset, see Cloth Simulation using Nvidia Apex


NCloth Simulation

The nCloth simulation provides good results and is a worflow artists are familiar with. However it comes at the price of performances.

Pros & Cons:

  • Quality & Ease of setup: the good old nCloth stuff
  • Performance: simulating cloth on only a few dozens characters already takes a long time
  • Unstability: nCloth has not been rely designed to have its nodes duplicated on a large number of characters, this method can lead to Maya crashes

For an example, see Cloth Simulation with nCloth

Blend Shapes

The Blend Shapes method is good compromise between baking everything and simulating everything, however it is very tedious to setup

Pros & Cons:

  • Ease of setup: the workflow by itself is already time consuming but on top of this getting the needed quality may require a lot of blend shapes
  • Performance: the time spent on setup is saved on simulation. Replaying blend shapes is way faster than fully simulating clothes
  • Quality: while it is possible to obtain a good quality, it takes time to setup, and avoiding some collisions may be impossible

For an example, see Cloth Simulation with Blend Shapes

Baked Cloth Simulation Replay

The Geometry Behavior enables to replay baked cloth simulation on a character. It is very fast and easy enough to setup, but except when dealing with simple cases it is not very flexible. 

Pros & Cons:

  • Performance: replaying baked simulation is VERY fast. That is why this method can be useful is you need 50 000 flags in a stadium and do not really care about animation/simulation sync
  • Quality: the simulation being baked, it will not react to your character animation. It may not be a probable when dealing with a flag, it is a big problem when dealing with a cape and a walking character

For an example, see Cloth Simulation with Geometry Behavior