GDC09: 'Cloth' becomes Havok's fastest selling product

by Griffin McElroy on Mar 26th 2009 7:25PM

Havok has produced a number of extremely popular software development kits and tool sets for developers to implement in their titles, though a surprising newcomer recently became the company's fastest selling product to date: "Cloth," an engine for processing movement in garments, hair and skin, is apparently all the rage. THQ sang the tool's praises at GDC, saying it allowed the publisher to "quickly generate and visualize high quality cloth assets" for its upcoming title, UFC 2009 Undisputed.

The engine, which launched in March 2008, should start appearing in games released this spring. In short, virtual clothes are going to be way prettier this year. Who's not excited about that?

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Tags: cloth, gdc-2009, havok, sdk, texture, toolset

Reader Comments (19)

surprisingly...i am

this is shouldn't be used for devs except in japan because most games don't have hair unless it's a sports game like UFC or a JRPG.

Maybe the clothes technology will be useful in shooters for...well, clothes.

*cough* GTA *cough*

I would imagine any dev who's developing a title that has characters wearing clothing, or hanging tapestries and the like would find this quite useful.

Also, I am pretty sure they call it Havok Cloth because it's focused on cloth... what makes you think it's intended tor use with hair?

@AoE

I think he meant the part where the article states, "'Cloth,' an engine for processing movement in garments, hair and skin."

Did you read the article AOE?

Remember when Street Fighter 2's intro had that white guy knocking out that black guy ... well paybacks a ___ vindication has been served in that above picture :P

Payback's an underscore, indeed. Underscore that motherfuckin' cracker.

2K has been using cloth physics for years in their NBA, College Hoops and MLB series, to name a few that I know of. I guess this Havok cloth is different because it's a tool kit being sold.
That said, I'm glad it'll be used more. It really adds to the visual realism of a game.

the only place can think of where this is noticeable is a superhero game or something. so unless that new batman's cape is LITERALLY SUPERFLY, it doesn't seem like it'll make much of a difference since everyone else wears skin tight tactical gear or something.

It seems to me that the only reason everyone wears skintight clothing is because loose clothes would look terrible without technology like this. So I hope it's something devs look to build into their games. Should help clothing look a lot more realistic even on tight stuff, particularly when you talk about twisting and bending and the regular normal map just doesn't look right anymore.

Also check out the red dress demo if you haven't already.

squidyj:
Plus full flowing cloth was extremely computationally intensive. So instead of a character with 5,000 polys (just using example numbers), you'd end up with a character model with 25,000 polys and a little bit of awkwardly dangling polygon clothing. It just wasn't worth it, because the end result wasn't realistic without full physics. It's been getting better lately, but clothing is still a pain in the ass from a performance and artistic standpoint.