CLO to Unreal Engine
Hi All,
Trying to find some advice on best workflow for exporting a fully rigged, clothed, and animated garment+avatar into Unreal engine. So far everythign I have tried has had no luck.
Is it best to separate the files (avatar, animation, garment) out then bring together in UE? Any advice is greatly aprpeciated.
Thanks!
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That's not going to work as a workflow as you need to understand that a model for UE needs to be prepared at a much lower resolution and be rigged as a low poly model in an external application such that the cloth is working with the 3D rigged model (both need to be weighted and rigged together). If you are just exporting a recorded cloth mesh vertex animation sequence then applying that model data and mesh cache back to the original animated character avatar all you need to do is bind the mesh cache to the exported garment model > however that is a fixed animation sequence and has no rigging nor is it suitable for realtime animation as a character and garment.
It reads like you may not have a full understanding about how a garment is built for rigging in a game engine, and that CLo3D by itself is NOT suitable to carry out that entire process > you might want to research more deeply their sister software MD and how that might be more suitable for this process > where you can retoplogise your cloth garment and bake down high poly to low poly cloth creasing such that a low poly model can be rigged in an external animation 3D software. eg: maya, modo, blender.
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Hi ottoline,
Thanks, definitely aware of the current full process---was just hoping maybe someone knew a quicker/easier way and that CLO would hopefully evolve to support an easier way of working in UE.
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It is easy to get the clothing assets into UE you just need to use the right software choice (eg: their sister company Marvelous designer). It basically is the same interface for drafting and can take in CLO3D garments directly > such that all you need to do is add in the low poly retopology for the garment and bake down the texture maps. Then it's standard workflow for assigning your garment to a character. However where MD performs well is in the character skin that can be mapped to any avatar which means you can fit a wardrobe to many characters (sizes) using mesh interpolation that weights the garment to the mesh - which saves a huge amount of work in the fit to avatar process into VR. That's as fast or faster than using CLO3D and secondary editing software.
So if you have a swag of CLO3D garments they can be opened in MD and the topology can be created and then fitted to the character and saved out as thin welded mesh, with texture atlas maps. That's probably the fastest process there is in terms of garment to VR workflow. Any garment to character needs to be fitted to a VR ready character avatar > which means the rigged avatar needs to be posed such that there is sufficient room around underarm, crotch, etc so the draped garment can be cycled through the VR characters basic motion poses. This confirms the garment will work well in realtime, once that editing is done (in MD) and the adjustments made you can save it directly to a rig along with weights. MD has a automated garment to character fit tool that means you can fit any single size garment to many character shapes. You can set the fit-skin to suit your needs. This would normally take more complex software to perform (eg: russian 3D scanner) but can actually be done very well inside MD.
My suggestion is look at MD and the MD10 + MD11 features and you will get a good overview of what it takes.
MD also has the Sansar export option > for VR also built in so you can test out some garments immediately in your own custom VR space using that eco-system.
The link to that software is at the foot of the CLO3D website ...
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