UE3 - UT3 Some questions from a beginner

[hisshi]

Hey there guys! I'm hisshi, a beginner in the modding scene (as far as creation goes, at least...) and I'm inspired (as many of you are I guess) to enter the "Make Something Unreal" contest, in the Machinima category.
The reason I've joined this community is to ask some questions (yes!) and hopefully to get some answers.

Well, I'll start off now:
What are the cloth/hair capabilities of the UE3 as far as animations/simulations go?
What I know so far is that the characters' clothes (like the main character's skirt thingie) are skinned to bones that are animated by the engines' physics, but what about the flags in CTF?

That's it for now and thanks in advance for any kind of answers!

Cheers!

 

[XeroWolf]

I'll answer your question the last one first and the first one last if you don't mind.

Ok, like you said UT3 characters use ragdoll bones skinned to the various parts of the character to simulate the clothing and hair. The CTF flag uses cloth physics.

I would say that the cloth physics capabilities in UE3 are ok for most purposes. It has most of what you would expect from cloth simulation. You can set certain parts of your mesh skinned to a bone to act as cloth. The cloth has gravity applied to it, reacts to player movement and you can apply wind to it aswel. However there are still some issues that I haven't been able fix.
So far I have not been able to get the cloth to collide with the rest of the non-cloth mesh or anything else for that matter. It should also react to weapons fire but I have yet to test those.

 

[hisshi]

Thanks a lot, XeroWolf! I didn't get to test anything last night, but I'm sure I'll play around today. I don't really need a super accurate cloth simulation, since the visual style will be cartoony and I wanna keep everything nice and simple.

Well, thanks again and cheers! I'll come around and ask some more questions in this thread when I stumble into something