Quantic Dream’s AAA PS4 Exclusive Will Use Havok Cloth for Physically Simulated Cloth and Hair

Quantic Dream’s AAA PS4 Exclusive Will Use Havok Cloth for Physically Simulated Cloth and Hair

Giuseppe Nelva May 14, 2014 9:55 AM EST

Quantic Dream is hard at work on one (or possibly two) unannounced PS4 exclusives, and today we learn one more interesting detail about it thanks to a career opportunity ad seeking a Technical Advisor explicitly mentioning a “AAA PS4 project”

The ad mentions the use of real time hair and cloth (AKA physically simulated), but more interestingly, it explicitly names Havok Cloth as the dedicated SDK the candidate will need expertise with.

Havok Cloth is part of the Havok physics middleware, and is described as follows on Havok‘s official website:

Havok Cloth is a performance-optimized development tool for creating believable simulation of cloth, hair, foliage and other soft body objects.

It includes the following features:

Artist-Driven Control of Behaviors – For easy control of behavioral properties such as stretching, damping, bending, and resistance to air.

– For easy control of behavioral properties such as stretching, damping, bending, and resistance to air. High-Performance Simulation – Multithreaded and platform-optimized for fast and efficient cloth simulation.

– Multithreaded and platform-optimized for fast and efficient cloth simulation. Landscape Collision Detection – Highly optimized, memory efficient and robust solution to collide cloth with arbitrary triangle meshes.

– Highly optimized, memory efficient and robust solution to collide cloth with arbitrary triangle meshes. Modeler-Based Set-up Tools – To allow artists to quickly and easily animate believable behaviors of character garments and environmental cloth.

Quickly and easily animate character clothing, hair, foliage, and other soft bodies.

Easily customizable and fits into today’s workflow to maximize the productivity of artists, animators, and programmers alike.

Out-of-the-box integration with Havok Physics™ and Havok Animation™. Ensure game characters and items closest to the camera look the best and allows for decoupling of simulation and display representation, so you can apply cloth simulation to arbitrary meshes, such as thick cloth Create controllable constraints in various areas, limiting the extent to which they can move and twist in that portion of the cloth.

Collide garments with animation-driven collision primitives to achieve highly believable reactions.

Havok Cloth is fully multi-threaded and cross-platform optimized for leading game platforms including, Xbox One®, the all-in-one games and entertainment system from Microsoft, Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system, PlayStation®4, PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, PC Games for Windows, PlayStation Vita®, Wii™, Wii U™, Windows 8, Android™, iOS, Apple Mac OS and Linux.

The site also includes a demo video that, while a bit old, gives a good idea of the effects Havoc Cloth can achieve.

We also found a nice trailer showing the use of Havok Cloth in Tekken Tag Tournament 2.

At the moment we don’t know if Quantic Dream will use other parts of the Havoc middleware in its upcoming game, but considering the synergy between them it’s possible. Havok technology was also used by Sucker Punch for inFAMOUS: Second Son.