Hello,

I am using Houdini Indie 16.5.323 and UE 4.18.2. I am trying to use the game shelf vertex animation exporter for a cloth simulation. In my simulation the cloth is torn. Currently I am using the soft setting for the export and having a lot of issues in UE4. I have been trying a few things, but I want to make sure I have a solid start. Is the soft setting the proper one to use? I know it is used for most cloth sims, but in mine you do have a hole being torn through the cloth, some of which does separate from the cloth during the simulation. Please give any advice you can so my debug efforts are not in vain.

Hey there!

If the topology is changing then you want to use the fluid option. If the topology stays the same throughout the animation then you can use the soft (if you have verts where the tears happen already)

Hope this helps!

Luiz

Hey Luiz (or anyone!),

Resurrecting an old thread here, but maybe you can help give us some idea as to how you might go about setting up a network that can retroactively alter a mesh on frame 1 of a cloth tearing simulation, so that it has the same topology as the mesh on the last frame (so that we could generate a vert cache texture that has static topology)?

Maybe something like adding attributes to new verts as they are created to ‘pair’ them with an existing one that has the same baseP value at the time, and then trying to match their positions up until the point where they separate? Or maybe ‘baking’ out the mesh on the last frame, snap its seams together on the first frame and setup their fracturing control attributes so they will tear at the same place, and then running the sim on the new mesh or something?

I am not looking for a detailed description or a complete .hip here, I just don't know enough about what's available in Houdini yet to know where to start, if what I am saying is possible, or if I am chasing some impossible, cyclical dependency here.

Thanks!

If you're using Vellum it'll have to be “prefractured” and held together with constraints. In that case the topology isn't really changing, you're just animating the position of the points that are already there and you should be able to use the Soft version for it.