How can i make fabric folds in Blender look more natural?

[MatthewDG]

I’m trying to get better at creating realistic fabric folds for a character’s clothing in Blender, but my sculpting always ends up looking stiff or unnaturally uniform. I’ve been studying reference photos and using the cloth brush, but I can’t seem to translate that into a natural-looking drape with proper tension and slack areas.

[Justin.L]

Yeah, I know that feel. I used to chase a smooth, uniform drape and got nothing but stiff silhouettes. I swapped to focusing on pose-driven wrinkles and used the cloth brush sparingly, but not as the whole solution. Gravity and tension started to show up in the way the fabric bunches at joints.

[TimothyS]

I found that paying attention to the body underneath—where the cloth is pulled and where it flows over a convex edge—made a bigger difference than trying to sculpt every fold. A couple of quick tweaks to the pose changed the fold direction across the chest.

[Scarlett_M]

Do you think maybe the issue is the pose or the fabric type? Sometimes I wonder if my stiffness comes from thinking the character needs a heavy fabric when the pose would be fine with something lighter.