Unity5: alternative to Cloths?

Unity Engine
1

Hello

As I understand, clothes were rewritten, are faster, and now only usable to dress your characters like if you were playing with Barbies. A lot of other uses, like as a parachute or a flag, are no longer supported.

What is the current approach to create a flag-like object? Manually program it? We no longer have the possibility to add colliders to some specific points of the cloth, or adding a join or anything.

Is there any straightforward alternative?
(yeah, I know there are some flags being sold in Asset Store, but not sure if they will work with Unity5, now!!)

Thanks for any hint
Alberto

2

Is the flag going to collide something, or respond to wind or something else?
Or could just have a waving vertex effect on a plane?

3

If you want to make a flag, create plane & add cloth component > add the plane mesh to the skinned mesh renderer > edit constraints and constrain on one edge > use external acceleration for wind.

1 Like
4

That almost works, but since Unity doesn’t render backfaces, the flag appears invisible from the opposite side. Is there any way to fix this?

5

Isn’t a double-sided shader what’s normally used?

6

You need to turn ‘Backface Culling’ off. See also this Manual page: ShaderLab: Culling & Depth Testing

Basically, you write ‘Cull off’ in the Pass of the SubShader. Download the Built-in shaders from the Unity Download page (it’s under ‘Additional Downloads’), copy the Standard.shader out of the .zip file into your project and edit it with MonoDevelop.

2 Likes
7

Hey

Thank you all for the answers. I’ll try to follow your suggestions. On the “one-side only” problem, I usually did that with two panes, one in each direction. But if changing the shader also works, I will dig that.

But as far as I could understand, I will need to turn of gravity, right? As the constrain does not force the object not to move.

Thanks
Alberto

8

Thanks! I did that, and it nearly works, but I noticed that the shadows/lighting don’t appear correctly when viewing the object from the reverse side. Examples:

From the front of the plane, the sphere casts a shadow:

After rotating the plane 180 degrees around the Y axis (no other changes to the scene), there’s no more shadow, and the lighting looks different:

I just added “Cull Off” into each SubShader Pass (I attached the edited version of the shader for reference). Is there something else I should be doing?

Thanks!

2069582–135017–StandardCullOff.shader (8.46 KB)

9

Wonderful. Thanks!

10

Just to correct me, gravity in the cloth component is not the “default” gravity, so, it is ignored by constrained nodes.