Video shows CCP's incredible cloth and hair simulation

We've known for some time that CCP planned to use physics simulation to make the clothes in EVE Online's Incarna expansion and their upcoming World of Darkness MMO more realistic. They even gave a talk on using NVidia's APEX cloth simulation at the 2010 Game Developer's Conference. Until now, all we've seen are technical details and the occasional screenshot, which makes it hard to work out how the end product will look.

NVidia have released a new video this week of CCP's cloth simulation in action, giving those of us that are interested a sneak peak at the incredibly impressive results. Although APEX cloth simulation will be introduced to EVE when Incarna is released, the video looks much more like something out of World of Darkness. As an added bonus, the system seems to simulate realistic hair and not just clothes. Hair in most MMOs has always been limited to shorter styles which would look alright without animation. The ability to simulate complex clothes and long hair styles make character customisation in World of Darkness and EVE's Incarna expansion look very promising.

Skip past the cut to watch the video in HD.
[Thanks for the tip, Patrick!]

Reader Comments (43)

...wow

Looks awesome... Hopefully they are able to do this with even 100's of people on the screen at the same time without major lag and performance issues.

No chance.

You will need the best of the best hardware to run this with even a few people on screen. There is zero chance you could have animations and everything else for 100 people on screen at once looking like that.

You do know that graphcs are handled by the client machine, and not the server right? The only thing the server will do is keep track of where people are, gfx processing is on client side. If you're gfx card can handle it, it should be no problem.

@Ryan
Have you been to Dalaran at peak hours? And that's hardly any polygons compared to modern games.

Incredible stuff!!

Yes, it's nice looking at ONE model with animated clothes and hair.
But in a MMORPG, you've A LOT of models...

From what I understand, all of the physics simulation is done at the content authoring stage when the animations are being created. The clothes are given a skeleton and areas of cloth are given different properties. Then when running through any animation for the model, the physics simulator calculates what should happen to the cloth and creates animations of it.

So while we see a stunning physics simulation, it's all been precalculated. In the background, all that's happening is the same standard animation we see applied to character models except with additional sets of animation for the clothes and hair. If I'm right about this being pre-baked animation, the actual rendering load for this type of model should be about the same as rendering 2-4 models without simulation. And since they only need to process those animations for models that are close enough to the camera for it to be noticeable, it should be totally doable on today's technology. I find that an incredibly exciting prospect!

@Brenda
Your assessment is incorrect. These are not 'baked' animations as they clearly state they are using PhysX 2.8.3 APEX Clothing simulator.

My framerate jumped from 5fps to 20 fps when I took off my pants.

+1 for pingles.

Faps Per Second?

Holy. Cow.

Incarna is gonna rock.

Would love to see DCUO use this.

Gah, uncanny valley

Those models certainly looks like they are out of WoD. I was sad to think i would have to choose between TSW and WoD but if the in-game animations and models gonna be like this(which i don't beleive it will) i will have to go with TSW anyway :)

Screw this, where's Dust 514?

The only other game I've seen with hair that comes close to that is Second Life and that has major lag, although it's more because of the design of the game than everyone having prim hair.

I like where this is going though.

Stunning. Every couple of years you see something in computer gaming industry that really takes your breath away. Wow. Just wow.

Compare this to any video of EQ1, and remember that it's only been 10 short years between that and this.

You can say "Oh, that's just one model - how will it run with 50 avatars on the screen!?!?!"

Just fine, thanks. Not in 2010, but bloody well soon enough for me!

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Video shows CCP's incredible cloth and hair simulation

Reader Comments (43)

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 11:13AM Joshua Przygocki said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 11:15AM DotCom said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 11:24AM kazamxi said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 4:24PM xgamer99 said

Posted: Mar 23rd 2010 9:19PM uncaringbear said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 11:22AM Mr Angry said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 11:23AM Sephirah said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 1:40PM Brendan Drain said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 9:41PM sandwiches said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 11:28AM Pingles said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 11:38AM ultimateq said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 12:25PM Thac0 said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 11:28AM DrewIW said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 11:42AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 12:20PM SgtBaker said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 12:23PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 12:37PM mode7overworld said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 12:42PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 1:22PM EdmundDante said

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 1:33PM (Unverified) said

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