FORMED AS RECENTLY as 2009, Chicago-based middleware firm Cloakworks is responsible for creating cloth simulation technology Shroud. The tool focuses specifically on simulating clothing on game characters, enabling developers to add dynamic interactive cloth, clothing and other soft-body physics effects to games and real-time applications. “That applies to the runtime where
the architecture and the simulation algorithm itself are designed to run efficiently and on the wide variety of hardware that developers are targeting without dragging the game’s frame-rate down,” explains Cloakworks CEO Joe Van Den Heuvel. “And it applies to the tools that
allow you to change settings and see the results right away so you can iterate rapidly to get the look you want.” Shroud also includes a run-time module that the outfit says can be added to any game engine for PC, Mac, consoles and mobile. It has also been released as a plug-in for Unity. “Shroud helps developers add an
extra layer of polish by taking their existing characters and turning their
Codeplay
static clothing into physically simulated clothes that move and react realistically to what they’re doing,” he says. “And it does it without killing
performance or limiting the best features to certain platforms or vendor-specific hardware.” The tool was recently licensed by
Trion Worlds for its fantasy MMO Rift, whilst it has also been used in the development of IO Interactive’s
upcoming third-person action shooter Hitman: Absolution. The latest iteration of the clothing
tool is 2.1, which introduced new multi-mesh support to make the setup process easier whilst also providing character artists with more options. “Artists can now use completely
different simulations to animate different parts of the same visual mesh, and with no seams in between,”
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he says. “Each simulation can have different constraints, collision settings, and even gravity pulling in different directions. “And the transition from one part to another is handled by simply painting the influence of the simulation directly onto the mesh.” Van Den Heuvel says Cloakworks has also made it easier for developers to share content created through Shroud, with users able to convert between different units and coordinate systems back and forth between XML and binary formats for various platforms.