Help with realistic Jacket Rigging Please

I am rigging a biped character in a blazer (jacket) which I want to pose in various positions for still renders. I wish the jacket to respond to real world gravity, so for example, if he leans forward or reaches up, the jacket splays out or if he is standing on a hill on a windy day, the jacket is blown open, etc.

The rest of the character’s clothes are part of his mesh and weight painted to the bones. I am uncertain how to rig the jacket so that it stay on him as I pose the character. I have tried pinning the jacket’s arms and collar to his shirt. I have tried weight painting the upper part of the jacket to the arm and neck bones and then adding a cloth modifier to affect the rest of the jacket, but the jacket either falls to the ground or deforms wrongly with the arms and upper jacket not connected to the model at all.

Clearly, my approach is wrong. Could someone please advise me the method I ought to be thinking of, or point me to a tutorial that takes in this type of rigging.

Many thanks.

You want the jacket hanging about to be automatic, right? Automatic cloth-like behavior the way you want it is really hard to achieve sometimes.
I can offer some solutions:

  1. Assigning bones to hanging parts of the jacket and animating them by hand. I know, it sounds inelegant but that’s the way I often end up doing it, because the damn thing just won’t go where I want it and sometimes it’s much simpler to just manually animate it.
  2. Assigning a cloth modifier to flappy parts only. From your post I see you already tried something like that, but I think you may be getting it wrong. You’re supposed to both weight-paint the jacket to the appropriate bones, AND set up a separate Vertex group that controls “pinning”. In that vertex group, paint the parts of the jacket that are supposed to stay firmly put, and leave the flappy parts alone. The unpainted parts will then flap according to cloth instructions.
    Here’s the box where you’re supposed to plug in the Pinned vertex group:


I use in this case corrective shape keys. so that your bones drive the shape keys.
you can use this addon for quick results

I recommend also using lattices or mesh deformer modifier. with lattices you can also drive their shape keys as well with the bones.