What settings help a cape cloth sim stop clipping and feel heavier?

[Harper.L]

I’ve been trying to nail a realistic cloth sim for a character’s cape in my latest project, but no matter how I tweak the collision geometry and damping, it either clips through the legs or just floats like it’s in zero gravity. I’m using a pretty standard dual-layer mesh setup for the simulation, but getting that sense of weight and follow-through without it looking like stiff rubber has me stuck.

[AddisonP]

Yeah I’ve been there. I chased damping and collision for ages and still saw the cape clip the legs. The turning point for me was realizing the two layer setup was distributing mass oddly, so I added a simple mass map and nudged the inner layer’s damping. It looked heavier and more fluid, even in a sprint, but it isn’t perfect yet.

[Kyle9]

I did a test with higher solver iterations and a smaller time step. It helped a bit but then the motion got stiff. Then I tried a weight map along the cape to soften the root and keep the tip lively; helped follow-through when the character lunged, but it still clips on fast leg movement.

[Ryan_M]

Maybe the problem isn’t the damping at all but how the cape attaches at the shoulders. I kept chasing settings and the cape still slid through when the legs moved. Do you have the cape bound to a bone that rotates really fast? Could that be masking the real limiter?

[Addison41]

One odd detour I tried was using proxy bones to guide the outer layer while the inner layer settles. It felt off at first, but once I let the proxy influence the outer layer only under large deltas, the cape kept some weight and followed leg motion better. Then I folded that into the main sim and tweaked a constraint instead of redoing everything.