I really like the supposed Soft Cloth capabilities of iClone 6 and when I run the sample project (the example with the 3 different table cloths) it works fine. I even recreated the same effect using rigid bodies instead of weight maps and it still works great.

Next I wanted to ensure that I would be able to do the same with my imported objects, so I created a soft cloth mesh (basically a rectangle of many small meshes), imported it into iClone 6 and used it, instead of the provided soft cloths, in the table cloth examples.

So far so good.

However, as soon as I tried some more complex soft cloth examples involving characters or custom meshes everything started to fail.

Here are some issues that I encountered:

- If the rigid body is too small (or the collision margin setting is too low) then the rigid body rips through the soft cloth as opposed to having the soft cloth slip over (and off) the rigid body. For example, a table cloth falling on a pole.

- G5 Characters, by default, do not appear to be rigid bodies and thus dropping soft cloths on them causes the soft cloth to pass right through them. Do I need to turn their Physics on and select them as rigid bodies?

- G6 Characters, by default, influence soft cloth somewhat. Dropping a soft cloth table cloth on top of a G6 character causes the soft cloth to bend around some parts of the character (for example the head) but not all parts (the cloth cuts through the arms for example).

- In some cases the movement of characters causes the soft cloth to move but in other cases the character just pokes though the soft cloth. For example, I made a very simple quick skirt by using a circular soft cloth with a hole in the middle (for the waist). When soft cloth physics were applied, the soft cloth dropped down the character until the hips of the character prevented it from dropping further (as expected). However, as the character moved, instead of pushing the skirt, the legs just cut through (poked through) the skirt instead of moving it.

I also had some issues getting Soft Cloth to work with my custom objects although this may be due to the last issue above. I imported a skirt mesh which had a bunch of fringe tassels attached to the hem. Although the skirt itself had a fairly low polygon count (and thus I would expect it to be fairly rigid) the tassels had a high polygon count so that they could bend as needed by the physics. When I imported this mesh into iClone 6, activated its Physics, selected Soft Cloth and applied my weight maps (tried both freefall weights where the skirt was held up by the characters hips and weight maps that held up the skirt on their own). However, when character movement was applied the mesh seemed to have remained very rigid and when the character moved, the character moved through it as opposed to moving it.

Can anyone let me know if these are bugs/limitations of the Soft Cloth or if I am doing something wrong...

Currently I am a DAZ Studio user but I am thinking of investing into iClone because it renders much quicker than my DAZ Studio and the soft cloth would be a great bonus.


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Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast