Havok Cloth

Havok Cloth is a physics-based animation tool developed by Havok that aims to provide realistic cloth and secondary motion effects for characters and environmental objects in video games. According to the vendor, this software caters to game development studios of all sizes, including both small indie studios and large AAA game studios. The target audience for Havok Cloth includes game artists, technical directors, game developers, animation studios, and professionals in the video game industry.

Key Features

Physically-based motion: According to the vendor, Havok Cloth enables the addition of realistic, physics-based motion to garments, deformable items, and foliage in game worlds. This feature allows for natural movement of items such as skirts, capes, hair, flags, and curtains.

Believable characters: The vendor claims that Havok Cloth empowers artists and technical directors to enhance the realism of characters during runtime, in-game cinematics, and set pieces. This feature includes the ability to add secondary animation effects for a more immersive experience.

Artistic control: The vendor states that Havok Cloth provides users with the ability to maintain their artistic vision by effectively handling edge cases like pinching and teleporting. The artist-guided workflow offers teams greater control over cloth behaviors, ensuring the desired outcome for each project.

Familiar tools: According to the vendor, Havok Cloth seamlessly integrates into existing workflows and offers a high level of customization. It aims to maximize productivity by fitting into familiar tools and processes, reducing the learning curve and streamlining production.

Artist-driven control of cloth behaviors: The vendor claims that Havok Cloth allows users to easily control cloth properties such as stretching, damping, bending, and air resistance. It also offers runtime support for slow-motion effects, variable frame rates, and high-frequency collision detection, providing flexibility in cloth animation.

High-performance simulation: According to the vendor, Havok Cloth provides fully multithreaded and highly optimized simulations for each supported platform. It minimizes memory usage during the instantiation of cloth items, ensuring efficient resource utilization. Additionally, it enables the simulation of partial cloth objects with smooth transitions between skinned and simulated areas.

Landscape collision detection: The vendor claims that Havok Cloth offers highly optimized and memory-efficient solutions for colliding cloth with arbitrary triangle meshes. It seamlessly integrates with Havok Physics, providing efficient collision detection for triangle and mesh landscapes.

Modeler-based set-up tools: According to the vendor, Havok Cloth includes modeler-based set-up tools that enable artists to animate realistic behaviors for character garments and environmental cloth. These tools support standard polygon modeling tools, allowing artists to work in familiar environments. The software also provides modeler plug-ins for easy integration and cloth property specification using vertex color painting.