Cloth Simulation with Mesh Deform Performing... Oddly

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
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Hello to all, thanks for reading and any help/suggestions you may offer.

I am having trouble with running a cloth simulation in a very short test animation I am making. In the scene I have a rigged character whose “body” object acts as a collision object, two layers of clothing (a blouse-type shirt beneath a long jumper-style dress) each of which is a separate object with cloth simulations. Around the cloth objects is a mesh object that acts as a deformer and is parented with weights to the armature of the character. The two cloth objects are bound to the mesh deformer and it seems to control them well enough, but at the start of my simulation the long dress oddly flares out before starting to settle and collide as it is designed to. If I wanted it to look like there was a strong wind it would be perfect, but that isn’t what my animation calls for.

My question is this: is there anything I am missing that would cause this behavior in the cloth sim? I have no particle emitters, force fields, or anything else that would cause the flaring. I should also mention that although the “jumper” mesh does sit over the “blouse,” the flaring occurs quite far from where the two meshes overlap, so I doubt it has anything to do with the cloths colliding.

Thanks again for any help.

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I figured it out. It was due to the self collisions and details in the mesh of the dress that caused the issue of the flaring. Unfortunately, I cannot remove the details (pleats in the skirt) as they are necessary, nor am I able to turn off the self collision as the pleats of the dress are necessary for character’s design and they penetrate in and out of the dress without the setting enabled. Some tweaking of the collision distance settings minimized the effects to an acceptable amount. Thanks again to all who read. I am sorry if I have wasted anyone’s time.

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A suggestion – always give Cloth a period of around 50 to 100 frames (sometimes even more) to "settle’ before proceeding with any animation, because the behavior you mention is typical even without Self-Collision. Once the Cloth mesh has draped itself into a stable starting shape, it reacts better to subsequent animation motions.

BTW, questions intelligently asked, such as yours, are never a waste of anyone’s time. That’s what the Support section is all about! And “Welcome!”

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