Office Hours — Cloth Physics

About this session

A Friday office hours that turned into a cloth session: from a static mesh to billowing real-time fabric, then recording the simulation so it plays back for free.

What we covered

Alex Coulombe walked through setting up real-time cloth physics in Unreal Engine from static mesh assets. The session explored mesh subdivision, clothing data painting, wind actors, and time dilation adjustments to achieve gentle billowy motion. Coulombe also troubleshot simulation recording workflows using Take Recorder and Chaos Caching.

1. 01Subdividing mesh geometry using Modeling Mode tools to provide adequate vertices for bending during simulation.
2. 02Converting static meshes to skeletal meshes to generate clothing data and configure physics.
3. 03Painting cloth weights with variable brush values to establish anchored areas and flexible zones.
4. 04Applying clothing data and configuring directional wind sources, wind speed, and randomized gusts.
5. 05Modifying world gravity settings and physics damping to produce slower, softer fabric movement.
6. 06Scripting Blueprint inputs to control global time dilation dynamically during live simulation.
7. 07Testing Take Recorder workflows with cloth actors and a ragdoll mannequin skeletal mesh.
8. 08Enabling the Chaos Caching plugin and configuring the Chaos Cache Manager to record simulation data.

AI summary of the session recording's transcript — the recording itself is the source of truth.

Your instructor

Alex Coulombe

Epic Games Authorized Instructor

Runs Manhattan's first Unreal Authorized Training Center and has spent ten years shipping real-time XR for architecture, live theater, and brands — now mostly on Apple Vision Pro, Quest, and AI-driven pipelines.

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