"Cinching" a belt or rope when animating clothes.

Hi blender bros, one of the things I am learning right now is how to animate clothing. One thing I’d like to do is animate clothing in one step, then in the next step I would cinch a belt or a rope belt around it and have the “cloth” further deform after the belt is tightened. I’ve run some searches but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do this. If it is possible and anyone has some advice / tutorials on how this might be done that would be great!

One idea I’ve had is that I might “sew” certain vertexes together and then put the “belt” over them although I am not completely sure how to do this or how necessary it is, since I would ideally have an actual belt that renders in a natural way on its own.

Thank you :slight_smile:

One easy way is to hook a loop of vertices to an empty, then pin those vertices in the cloth modifier. You can then scale the empty to affect the hooked vertices.

A bit of experimenting got this: