How do people use cloth simulation to speed up fabric folds in character work?

[AlexanderA]

I’ve been trying to get better at creating realistic fabric folds in my character work, but my current method of sculpting them by hand feels so slow and inconsistent. I’m wondering if using a cloth simulation system to generate the primary folds before doing a detail pass is a more common workflow for this.

[Natalie.S]

I've tried a cloth sim to lay out the primary folds. It gives you the big shape fast, which is a win, but I still have to fix a lot by hand—ghost wrinkles, self collisions, things looking too stiff until I sculpt the details.

[AdamHG]

When the garment is tight or clingy, the sim can exaggerate gravity or pull in odd ways, so I treat it as a base only and layer the final folds with manual sculpting and some masking to keep it natural. It speeds up the early stage but you pay in cleanup.

[James.R]

One thing I keep wondering is whether the real bottleneck is the folds themselves or the pose and silhouette changing how they sit, because sometimes the same base fold looks fine in one pose and wrong in another, and I can't tell which problem is really the root.

[GaryH]

I did a quick test with a cape and got clean primary folds in the sim, but when I posed it later the movement pulled the folds into places I hadn't intended and the detail pass felt like fighting gravity. I dropped relying on the sim for that piece and kept manual shaping for the rest.