What settings on nCloth help make cape motion natural and not stiff?

[Andrew_T]

I’ve been trying to get a more natural, weighted feel on my character’s cape using nCloth, but the secondary motion always feels either too stiff or like it’s floating in water. I’m not sure if my issue is in the solver settings, the mesh density, or the way I’ve painted the vertex maps.

[LunaS]

I’ve spent weeks on this with nCloth and still can’t pin it down. Sometimes the cape feels heavy and anchored, other times it just stiffens up or drifts like it’s underwater. I kept thinking it was the solver, but in the end the weight maps on the cape seemed to steer the motion more than I expected. If the vertex weights aren’t smooth along the edge, it’ll lock up or flap wrong.

[AlexanderNL]

On a recent pass I bumped the substeps and solver iterations a notch and tuned damping a bit. It quieted the big oscillations, but the sim got noticeably slower and it never truly settled into a natural swing.

[Kyle9]

I also tried density tricks, adding a few extra subdivisions near the hem and along the seam. It helped a touch, but the wobble would return when the torso moved. The painting and how the maps bleed into nearby verts made the difference more than I thought.

[HarperJ]

Could it be the collision setup or how the cape is attached to the body is the real bottleneck, not the cloth sim itself?