What separates well-set cloth physics from something that looks amateurish? For example, this vid:
Notice how the cloth feels too inertial and flimsy compared to this one:
I've tried fiddling with stiffiness and inertia but that just doesn't make it look all that good just weirdly floaty.
Try experimenting with different cloth sim mesh densities! In my experience the density of the sim mesh plays a big role in how it behaves. Making it denser might feel like it should give better fidelity, but in practice it makes the cloth lose lower-frequency detail and get too wrinkly and noisy.
Another way to think about it: if you want something leather-y and more structurally stable like the coat in the second video, you want longer connections between sim points, which means lower mesh density.
Understood! So ideally you'd be driving your cloth sim by a proxy of variable density, is that right? You change the proxy instead of the mesh.
Yes, the editor allows you to pick a mesh section to build the sim mesh from, and then remove it from the visible mesh, so it can act as a proxy.
Huh, that's neat. I thought I'd have to fire up my DCC for that. Thanks!
Sorry, I was not clear - you do need to make the proxy section in the DCC! I was only saying that the editor allows you to import those as part of the visual mesh and then hide it away after creating the cloth sim proxy.