Havok for Unreal: Quarterly Highlights (January 2026, Unreal Engine 5.7)

Havok Cloth for Unreal continues to evolve with improvements that make your simulations more stable, more customizable, and easier to integrate into real world productions. Over the last releases, we’ve focused on giving teams finer artistic control, higher platform stability, and more predictable visual results, whether you’re authoring complex cinematics or deploying across platforms with different hardware capabilities.

Here are the newest improvements to Havok Cloth for Unreal:

Improved Cloth Stability & Crash Prevention

Cloth components are now much more resilient in complex editor and runtime scenarios. We’ve tightened lifecycle handling across cloth actors, collidable components, and mesh references to ensure all internal resources are initialized and released safely.

This includes fixes for several high impact editor crashes that could occur when:

• • • Reloading or saving levels containing Cloth Collidables.
    • Deleting or force‑removing Skeletal Mesh assets referenced by Cloth Assets.
    • Creating or saving Blueprints that contain Havok Cloth Collidable components for the first time.

These changes eliminate rare but disruptive crashes and ensure cloth rendering and simulation are safely disabled when required assets become unavailable, preventing invalid rendering paths and stray references from persisting in the scene.

Smoother More Accurate GPU Deformation

GPU driven cloth deformation is now better synchronized with character animation and rendering. An issue where GPU‑deformed cloth appeared one frame behind character motion has been resolved, ensuring visual output matches the intended simulation frame.

We’ve also improved robustness when changing cloth materials during a frame. Material updates are now correctly synchronized with the rendering thread, preventing visual corruption and ensuring the final material choice is consistently reflected in the rendered output even when materials are changed multiple times per frame.

These updates deliver cleaner, more predictable cloth behavior, particularly in fast‑moving gameplay and cinematic scenarios.

Better Visual Quality on Nintendo Switch 2

Several platform specific stability and rendering issues on Nintendo Switch 2 have been addressed. Cloth scenes now behave reliably under demanding rendering passes such as motion blur, and internal buffer handling has been tightened to prevent instability caused by loose or transient parameters.

Both CPU and GPU deformed cloth now remain stable across demo maps and real gameplay content, ensuring consistent behavior on Nintendo’s next generation hardware without requiring asset changes.

Cleaner Actor Setup & Easier Integration

We’ve simplified how Havok Cloth actors and collidable components behave in the engine, reducing unnecessary component churn and improving performance and reliability.

Cloth Collidable components no longer aggressively unregister and re‑register on every transform update. Instead, shapes are now updated in place and only when required (for example, when the shape type or scale changes). This significantly reduces overhead in complex scenes and avoids costly component lifecycle operations during gameplay or editing.

When you assign a Havok Cloth Asset to an actor, the system continues to create the correct component setup automatically, resulting in cleaner scene hierarchies, fewer unused fields, and a more intuitive authoring experience in both Blueprints and C++.

More Control Over LOD Behavior

You can now completely disable automatic cloth LOD transitions. This is especially useful for projects that manage display mesh LODs independently and want to prevent cloth from falling back to a skin only mode.

By staying in full control of when and how cloth LOD transitions occur, teams can achieve more predictable behavior across gameplay, cinematics, and stylized projects.

Improved Import Flexibility & Pipeline Tools

The cloth import pipeline has been expanded to better support modern production workflows:

• • • A new vertex-based mesh matching mode allows assets to be imported without pre-triangulation, simplifying DCC workflows.
    • A dedicated CVar for mesh matching enables easier A/B testing when evaluating pipeline changes or working with multi-studio asset sources.
    • Full support for the Interchange FBX importer ensures Havok Cloth assets import cleanly in Unreal Engine 5.7, without relying on legacy import paths.

These improvements make it easier to maintain consistency and predictability when integrating cloth assets from multiple teams and tools.

More Robust Simulation During Complex Updates

Havok Cloth now safely supports modifying cloth components during physics stepping. Internal state is preserved correctly when components are dynamically created, removed, or updated mid‑frame, removing previous risks of invalid simulation state.

This makes cloth simulation more resilient in complex gameplay systems where characters are spawned, assembled, or modified dynamically during runtime.

Documentation & Workflow Improvements

Our documentation has been refreshed to better reflect current cloth behavior and recommended workflows. Outdated guidance has been removed, and “Getting Started” sections have been updated based on direct partner feedback, particularly around scene setup, placement, and collidable component authoring.

These updates provide smoother onboarding for new users and faster iteration for experienced teams working in production.