Clothing system

Since I started the animation process, I was wondering how to animate roots and roof. At first, I wanted to add bones and make the standard animation, but this could be a harrowing and long process since I find it hard to animate the object like clothing or hair. I received a piece of advice that I could use a clothing system inside the Unreal Engine. Applied to the object, it simulates the natural movement of the clothing, and it works together with the animation. This way, I can work way more efficient, because it is fast and rather easy.
To use the clothing system, I had to keep roof and roots on separate materials because this is the only way to use section selection and select a certain part of the model in order to apply clothing.

section selection tool

Next part was to the clothing system. It was applied for roof and roots separately because this way is easier to control it. To make it work, I had to paint the clothing data on the model. It was a bit similar to painting weights when using the skin modifier in 3Ds Max. Painting cloth tells the system where I want the modifier to be applied and also how strong it should be. 

Cloth paint. White- applied, pink- static.

I had to be quite carefully whit the roof painting since I wanted to create a gentle movement just on edges of the roof, so with every step that the house will do, the parts that are loosely hanging can bounce a little. Roots can be all covered with white, except the thin part connected to the house, because I want the whole part to move. 

I attempted the first testing, and surprisingly nothing worked. I checked a lot of tutorials, and I couldn't find the issue. However, it comes up that it was something wrong with my version of Unreal, so I had to switch to an older one, and everything worked perfectly. 

In my opinion, the clothing system is the easiest and fastest way to create a natural animation for this

type of objects.

   

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