Cloth on animated character - to rig or not to rig?

[Sambor]

Hello

I’ve made my character as a naked body, and added some clothes on it. My charectert is rigged, weight-painted and some actions for the armature are already done. I’m quite happy with my charecter animation, but he is still naked. So now comes the question - how to dress him up? My character is modelled in a classic T-pose, he wears loose medieval tunic, trousers and a hood. All the clothes are modelled so they match the initial pose of my character
Do I need to rig and weight-paint the clothes and parent it to the same armature?
Or - should I leave it unrigged and the simulation of collision between animated body and cloth layers would do the job better and more accurate?

Sorry if my post is repeating in any way, i did some research on the web and there are lots of tutorials, tips & forum discussions about the first workflow, but there is barely anything about the second one.

Edit: found this advice from Kent Trammell on the cgcookie forum

If your characters are wearing loose clothing like a trenchcoat, a cape, or baggy clothes, simulation is the only real option for believability. It’s a very hard thing to setup and achieve efficiently whether you’re using Blender or another package.

https://cgcookie.com/t/1244-how-do-you-rig-clothes-your-process

[yogyog]

Myself, I would rig it… maybe using cloth sim for the floppy bits like the skirt of the tunic and the edge of the hood (both around the hood and the other edges) using pinning.

[kabu]

Before getting crazy on this, you could give a try at Rich Colburn’s Modeling CLoth

[Sambor]

@kaku - It’s a good addon (although still buggy and unfinished) and it can speed up cloth modelling in many cases. It lacks point caching so it’s rather unuseful for gamedev. In my case I just do a game in 2d with prerendered sprites animation, so i tried to animate character’s clothes with this addon. In my case it doesn’t work - suddenly the leg of my character intersects the leg of the trousers.