How do I fix pin group issues in Blender cloth sim to get natural draping?

[KevinMP]

I’ve been trying to get better at animating cloth in Blender using a combination of soft body and cloth sims, but I keep hitting a wall with the pin group settings. No matter how I adjust the vertex weights or the stiffness, the fabric either tears unrealistically at the anchor points or just floats away entirely instead of draping naturally.

[Ryan.D]

I hit the same tearing around anchors until I redefined the anchor group so only the vertices that should stay fixed have weight 1.0. After that I bumped the collision distance a bit and turned on self collision. It cooled down the stretch at the anchor points, though you still need some motion damping to keep things from wobbling.

[HannahT]

Solver stability helped me more than tweaking stiffness. I raised the substeps and quality steps, and dialed gravity down a notch. A lot of the weird drift disappeared once the cloth could settle between steps.

[Logan3]

I tried a quick test with a smaller patch first; any tearing showed up less and I could iterate faster. When I scaled to the full piece the same issue came back, so I kept testing on the sample and then applied what seemed stable.

[Zachary.J]

Are the anchor objects or the target pose moving during the sim? If the anchor points shift, the cloth will pull and tear right where it starts. If you have any animation on the anchor, try baking it separately or freezing that transform during the sim.