Model cloth pressure in Unity 5

Question

In Unity 4 the cloth component contained a property pressure which allowed modelling inflated objects. However, in Unity 5 this option is gone.

I have tried variations of the parameters of the cloth object, but have not been able to achieve the same result as the one in Unity 4. In Unity 4 it was fairly simple to model a realistic inflated bouncing basketball. I am aware that this could be simplified, but what if I needed to model something that clearly bends on contact, such as a balloon?

Is there a way to model an inflated object in Unity 5?

Answer 1

The official 5.0 Physics Upgrade Guide says that cloth simulations have been improved, but there are some features that aren't available anymore like pressure:

However, some functionality which was available on the old InteractiveCloth is now no longer supported by the new version of PhysX as it is difficult to implement these with good performance. Specifically:

• you can no longer use cloth to collide with arbitrary world geometry
• tearing is no longer supported
• you can no longer apply pressure on cloth
• you can no longer attach cloth to colliders or have cloth apply forces to rigidbodies in the scene.

So for this question, there appears to be no built-in way to model an inflated object. The Cloth api doc doesn't seem to contain any way to apply forces to individual points, either, so I can't see a way to simulate it manually.

Hopefully some other answer can prove me wrong, but it doesn't look like you can model an inflated object using the physics engine in Unity 5.