07-31-2018, 11:24 PM
Wanted to share some advice when dealing with Apex collision volumes, in hopes of saving people from dealing with the shenanigans I've been going through these last few days.
So, I made sort of a basic trenchcoat apex asset with collision volumes for Dante and Nero that seemed fine, but the jacket was constantly clipping into the legs no matter what I tried. I couldn't figure out what was happening because the collision volumes in the program seemed fine:
Increasing self-collision and thickness values helped a little but didn't solve my problem. All of the collision overlapped, there's no reason the jacket should be clipping into the mesh.
Then it hit me when watching the animation where Nero's leg always clipped;
What I THINK is happening is that during certain animations (especially kicks) the collision volumes separate for a brief moment and create gaps, And then the APEX cloth gets stuck in the gaps. It's especially a problem for games like Street Fighter that skip frames in animation, which causes the collision volumes to warp around every time frames are skipped.
The work around I figured out for now then, is to use the bones that don't really move around and use them to create a big collision volume under the legs so the cloth can't slip through.
The big red circle around the legs is the pelvis bone- because it's at the center of Nero's mesh it almost never moves with an animation. And by making it giant and having it surround his legs it creates a sort of force field around the groin of the mesh so that Apex cloth can't clip through it during kicks.
It's a dumb little trick but it took me days to figure out.
Probably explains why a lot of the Apex meshes have an Invisible Material slot, probably to generate a lower body collision volume.
Hopefully it helps somebody foolish enough to deal with Apex down the road.
So, I made sort of a basic trenchcoat apex asset with collision volumes for Dante and Nero that seemed fine, but the jacket was constantly clipping into the legs no matter what I tried. I couldn't figure out what was happening because the collision volumes in the program seemed fine:
Increasing self-collision and thickness values helped a little but didn't solve my problem. All of the collision overlapped, there's no reason the jacket should be clipping into the mesh.
Then it hit me when watching the animation where Nero's leg always clipped;
What I THINK is happening is that during certain animations (especially kicks) the collision volumes separate for a brief moment and create gaps, And then the APEX cloth gets stuck in the gaps. It's especially a problem for games like Street Fighter that skip frames in animation, which causes the collision volumes to warp around every time frames are skipped.
The work around I figured out for now then, is to use the bones that don't really move around and use them to create a big collision volume under the legs so the cloth can't slip through.
The big red circle around the legs is the pelvis bone- because it's at the center of Nero's mesh it almost never moves with an animation. And by making it giant and having it surround his legs it creates a sort of force field around the groin of the mesh so that Apex cloth can't clip through it during kicks.
It's a dumb little trick but it took me days to figure out.
Probably explains why a lot of the Apex meshes have an Invisible Material slot, probably to generate a lower body collision volume.
Hopefully it helps somebody foolish enough to deal with Apex down the road.