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While the cloth simulator that just made it into Blender is great and easy to use for demos, I’ve found it more difficult to use in a production fashion. The Mom’s skirt in The Beast was scheduled to get the cloth sim treatment, but after fighting with it for several days, I’m going to have to use a more traditional approach. The main problem might be that the skirt itself is of the wool variety, so it really doesn’t act a lot like cloth does. It’s extremely rigid and barely wrinkles at all. There are also some workflow shortcomings in the cloth (pre-roll ability, evaluate on stepped frames and interpolate for fast testing) that make it difficult to use in a production environment.

So, instead of using the cloth sim, I’m just including the skirt inside the mesh deform cage for the rest of the body, which gives good enough deformations in testing.

I’d still like to use the cloth sim somewhere in the animation just for fun, but there’s no where that it really fits.