NVIDIA APEX Clothing
APEX Clothing
APEX Clothing lets artists quickly generate characters with dynamic clothing to create an ultrarealistic interactive gaming experience.
APEX Clothing provides cross-platform support and is built on top of the APEX Framework, which means it provides easy-to-use scalability controls for different gaming platforms. Integrating the APEX Framework into your game engine allows artists and game developers to use existing APEX modules—APEX Destruction and Vegetation—and future modules, knowing that they will interact properly with Clothing.
You can use APEX Clothing to simulate any type of clothing—coats, robes, skirts, dresses, and scarves—and even hair
Key features of APEX Clothing include:
- Artist-focused tools to ensure turnkey solutions
- Full artist control over clothing settings and behavior (such as motion radius, stretching, damping, and bending)
- Full and partial physical simulation of cloth
- Support for bone collision as well as A-collision
- Cross-platform support (PC, PC+GPU, PS3, and Xbox360)
- Ease of scalability for different gaming platforms
- Level of Detail control
- Support for single-layered cloth and thick clothing
- Support for soft bodies
CCP (Eve Online) integrated APEX Clothing into their engine and used it for both clothing and hair simulation. The results, as seen in the video below, provide incredible evidence of what can be achieved using APEX Clothing.
APEX Clothing Tool
APEX Clothing is artist focused and the authoring tool is intuitive and easy to use. This feature ensures that artists can quickly generate fully simulated and realistic clothing without an extensive knowledge of the underlying PhysX SDK. The tool gives artists full control over clothing motion as well as other clothing parameters like stretching, bending, and dampening. Plus, a preview window within the tool shows the actual simulated clothing, dramatically reducing iteration time for creating realistic clothing.
APEX Clothing Integration into other engines
Simutronics integrated APEX Clothing into HeroEngine, a Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) engine. Characters in MMOG games usually change direction rapidly (from one frame to the next), based on user input and when HeroEngine artists used APEX Clothing to add physics to various clothing elements, none of the animations needed to be changed. The Level of Detail control empowered HeroEngine to use lots of characters onscreen simultaneously without performance degradation.
Soft Body Dynamics
APEX Clothing has support for true softbody simulation using tets integrated into the 3ds Max and Maya Clothing plug-in. Authoring is similar to APEX Clothing and allows the artist to create simulated softbody animations quickly.
