Why is my cloth sim too stiff or floaty on character models?

[JamesCS]

I’ve been trying to get better at creating realistic fabric in my character models, but my cloth sims always end up looking either too stiff or unnaturally floaty. I’m not sure if my issue is with the gravity and force settings, or if I’m just using the wrong type of mesh for the garment’s thickness.

[OliverJ]

Ive felt the same way. For me the moment it clicked was tuning damping and bending stiffness together. If damping is too low the fabric jitters; too high and it reads stiff. I also added self collision and kept collision distance reasonable so the edges actually drape instead of tunneling through the body. And yes the mesh thickness matters— if the garment is effectively too thin for the thickness of the character, it can look floaty no matter what you do.

[LoganR]

I wonder if the real bottleneck isnt gravity at all. Sometimes the pose and motion path push the fabric into the body or pull it away in odd ways, and you get that stiff or floaty read even with sane settings. Maybe double-check the rig scale, how you pose, and whether there are hidden collisions or volume preservation constraints acting up.

[DonaldBR]

I did a quick test to sanitycheck numbers. kept gravity steady, tried 30 vs 60 solver iterations, and nudged mass from 1.0 to 1.3. The drape settled faster with higher iterations, but when I boosted mass the fabric just pulled downward and didnt settle cleanly. I measured how the sleeve distance to forearm changed frame to frame and saw a few tens of percent variation under the same pose.

[HarperT]

I even toyed with the idea that the problem might be scale. If the character model isnt built to the same unit scale as the sim, everything looks off. After nudging the model to a more realistic scale, the same settings behaved more predictably, but I still dont trust that Ive nailed it yet.