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)

Start stocking exotic dancers

As fantastic as that looks, I probably won't see this being normal on a MMO until sometime in the future when everyone has a computer capable of handling this eye-candy with ease. But I always salute progress, and this looks quite tasty. Now I want to see what the team has in store for the World of Darkness...this just whets my appetite.

If i can say something all the others aren't saying, World of Darkness was announced in 2006, and this is the first hint even of it being anything other than vaporware. "Walking in stations" in EvE? Um, fun? EvE is still rmt for skills due to how skills are earned real time (not to mention the skills that take over a month), and one of the least fun games i've ever played. They also said WoD was to be out this year, probably pushed back a good deal.

I can also whip this out in Maya in a week or so. They can say it's game engine, but i've seen enough prerendered footage being called game engine before to take them at their word.

Only one thing, CCP has never officially announced that they are doing a WoD mmo. You really have to dig through their financial and shareholder documents in order to find anything about it. Officially it is just an unnamed MMO.

Nice, but why limit your market by using nVidia APEX? That's just a huge mistake when ATI is on the rise and nVidia's new graphics card is going to bomb horribly, with massive production problems, being a power hog, and having heat problems. Just a bad idea to limit yourself using nVidia tech. Huge mistake.

The tech isn't limited to NVidia cards. It's very similar to something like Havok - It's just software, not anything encoded into hardware.

CCP makes a point of keeping their stuff running on as many machines as possible, especially since their subscriber base is relatively small, they're not going to bankrupt themselves by releasing tech for their games that only runs on NVidia cards. I think i've heard them mention that their userbase for EVE is split almost exactly 50/50 between NVidia and Ati anyway.

They used to make some hoopla over some CUDA tech they were building into the EVE engine (at FF 2008), but as far as i know this has been dropped aswell.

Very promising if it will be used in World of Darkness

Truly amazing. CCP's got my money.

Looks quite good actually, hope we see it soon in EVE.

As for perfomance issues.
Cloth simluation is one of the easiest and simplest physics simulation. Although it's complexion increase drastically with higher vertex count per simulated object.
More importand and perfomance monster is collision detection between two clothes, self-collision detection etc. But I dont think anyone will check cloth-to-cloth collisions in games, cause it's gonna be killer...

Ah those animations are real-time, there is no bake. It's not possible to bake such animations (ok it's possible, but it will need huge amount of frames to actually caputre realistic cloth, and even simplest realtime simulation will give much better and convincing results).

I will agree with the many comments on the nvidia forums. CCP does not have the capability to make a video like this nor can they put the quality into their current engine. As many stated CCP ordered a pizza (interesting quote from someone) They asked NVIDIA to make something amazing, something CCP currently cant do.

I follow CCP pretty closely as I am a big fan of EVE and they have barely shown anything from what they can do with their engine. I am not saying you are wrong I am just saying I don't really think there is enough info for anyone to really say. I am also not sure about why NVIDIA would post a video saying CCP made this if it was really NVIDIA that made it.

@Graill,
I agree with Firebreak. You haven't demonstrated the capability to measure CCP's capability in making an engine like this.

I have no reason to believe that this wasn't made by CCP themselves. The issue here is NOT if CCP can/can't make a demo of a single character with amazing cloth/hair animations. They certainly have done just that.

The area where most people are skeptical of is if current PCs used by players will be able to efficiently render this sort of animation in real time for multiple (potentially hundreds) of arbitrary characters at once while keeping a game playable. This is the key issue here. I personally think that while CCP is working on an engine capable of doing that, it will require extremely beefy and expensive hardware on the players' end (by today's standards). In few years, however, this hardware may be commonplace.

Now that real physics is involved in clothing now....... I would think wearing such long dresses would be a disadvantage in combat XD

You can still wear long dresses in combat now because all they do is hang there.... but i can just imagine that long black dress making her trip down the stairs XD

What a even better way to get more attached to your character in the virtual world XD

But we're supposedly talking WoD here! If you take away all the Victorian-goth-chick clothes for impracticality, you alienate your audience!

Well the clothing looks nice but the computer model is frightening.

It's jerky movements and blank expression looks to me as if the "person" is not psychologically healthy.

What I find fascinating is our search for photorealistic human simulation highlights just how little we know about ourselves.

I just see this as another aspect of ourselves. Those who are not secure in themselves might be frightened of it.

Looks pretty. But it's CCP, the company that cheats players in favor of Devs, so I'd never play it.

To my knowledge that happened once, a -very- long time ago and it was only one dev who was aptly punished for it.

It's hardly enough to call CCP "the company that cheats it's players".

...but yeah. Pretty. :)

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Video shows CCP's incredible cloth and hair simulation

Reader Comments (43)

Posted: Mar 20th 2010 1:44PM mko said

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