CloakWorks Shroud tech heads to Unity

Illinois tech outfit CloakWorks has made its Shroud cloth simulation tech available as a plug-in for Unity.

Available for purchase in the Unity Asset Store, and as free trial in the Cloakworks store, Shroud for unity promises to deliver much of the power of the power of the full cloth, clothing, and other soft-body physics effects package.

“Though Shroud has been used in some really high-profile titles, our goal is to make the creation of realistic cloth achievable and practical for every developer,” said Joe van den Heuvel, CEO of CloakWorks.

“That is why we launched this new plugin for Unity – it will open high-performance cloth creation to a brand new audience and let them experience just how easy it can be to create highly realistic capes, cloaks, hair, ropes and so much more for their Unity-powered games.“

Priced at $400, Shroud for Unity includes – as detailed by a statement to the press – the following features:

• High performance across platforms
• Instancing: Shroud shares static data between multiple instances of the same cloth rig, drastically reducing memory usage
• Modular architecture lets you mix and match constraints and effects
• Advanced continuous collision detection prevents missed collisions with fast-moving objects
• Custom controls keep physics-based clothing moving smoothly even when the characters wearing them are not
• Level of Detail: Artists can blend between physics and skinning on the fly, and automatically turn off the simulation when it is far from the camera.

Shroud for Unity requires users to also use Shroud Studio to create content for use with the plug-in.

Last week Trion Worlds picked the full version of Shroud for MMO rift.