Skinned Cloth and Black Vertices.

Does anyone know why some geometry inserts black verts into skinned cloth?

There are two posts on this on Answers and both are answered by the same guy who says he fixed it by reducing the number of UV islands in his mesh. My UVs aren’t split into islands, and there’s no mention of SkinnedCloth having UV dependencies, nor black verts, in the docs. Damned annoying because they can’t be selected.

It’s a recent bug in Unity. If you have any UV seams or any smoothing groups or “sharp” edges, it will fail and you will see these black vertices, as well as errors in the Editor GUI like:

IndexOutOfRangeException: Array index is out of range.
UnityEditor.ClothInspector.SelectionGUI () (at C:/BuildAgent/work/812c4f5049264fad/Editor/Mono/Inspector/ClothInspector.cs:230)
UnityEditor.ClothInspector.OnInspectorGUI () (at C:/BuildAgent/work/812c4f5049264fad/Editor/Mono/Inspector/ClothInspector.cs:349)
UnityEditor.InspectorWindow.DrawEditors (Boolean isRepaintEvent, UnityEditor.Editor[ ] editors, Boolean eyeDropperDirty) (at C:/BuildAgent/work/812c4f5049264fad/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorWindow.cs:863)

When Unity imports a SharedMesh, it (and/or the importing tool) splits vertices such that each vertex only has one UV and one normal. This is standard and necessary when feeding the vertices to the renderer.

However, the SkinnedCloth editor only needs to deal with positions of vertices, so it merges all vertices at the same position back together for the purposes of coefficient editing. Again, this is useful and clever.

Unfortunately, some bug in Unity is messing this up, and until they fix it, SkinnedCloth is basically useless. I have reported a self-contained project demonstrating the problem (Case 530015), so hopefully it gets fixed, because until it does, my WazHack has to stay in beta.

Still broken in 4.1.

Basically, SkinnedCloth has not worked at all for the entire 4.x series.

This bug is really annoying with no other alternative except the costly shroud system. Unity Developers please fix this soon.

If you turn off optimization on the mesh, the dots at least seem to stay consistent upon saving. But I get physics engine crashes later with cloth enabled, so I can only assume the Unity guy who implemented cloth has quit or something because all bugs I report with it didn’t even get responded to. Too many features, not enough quality.

@Waz, Well I turned off the Optimization option and now I get fewer black vertices, but they are still there in certain regions. Also another thing which I forgot to mention was this bug I was facing https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3791129/Unity_Bug.png


This problem goes away once I paint a few vertices but does make the work difficult. Also turning off the optimization made no changes for this bug.

I’m having a hard time animating my character’s cape due to lack of vertex animation support and the bugged cloth physics.

You need to tell it the right Root Bone. I think there are bugs in that too, but usually selecting the correct root works.

Personally, cloth just frustrates me and makes me angry at Unity, so I try to avoid thinking about it :wink:

Interactive Cloth (non-skinned) has a different collection of bugs that also make it utterly useless.

to solve it you may simply clic on play and stop it.
the dots will return to the mesh position

My approach to Unity bugs is simple: report them, stop using the supposed ‘feature’ involving them, and bitch and moan about it on every forum I have until they fix it. I’m not interested in half-solutions to their bugs.

Just a note - this is still broken in 4.6.

In the end, I gave up on Cloth in Unity 4 and bought Unity 5. Beware the treadmill.

Yeah, we’ve got Unity 5 as well, but this is a legacy project, and I don’t want to upgrade so close to release.