I have this cloth simulation in Blender and every time I initially bake it, it looks fine. However, If I close and reopen Blender, it has this horrible jitter to it, almost as if it has some kind of displace modifier (it doesn’t, I checked). Any clue what could be causing this? The only force in the scene is wind.
Here’s a comparison:
Good
Bake the cache to disk so it doesn’t recalculate
If I do that, when I reopen the project, it acts as if it never got baked. It says all of the frames are on disk but it won’t render or display them.
That’s… weird 
Is your disk cache on an internal drive or an external drive?
External, I’ll try saving it to an internal and see if that’s any better
Still no luck, baked it on my C drive and it still becomes a jittery mess. This is such a bizarre issue LOL
If anyone in the future comes across this, I “solved” the issue by not having my simulation start in the negatives. It’s not really a proper fix, but I was motion-tracking footage and just trimmed a few frames off the beginning.
Oooh yeah negative frames don’t work for simulations. I forgot about that
Thank you, I don’t think I would have figured this out. For a while I’ve been wondering why sometimes when I load a saved Blend file with existing physics (disk cache), I have to rebake everything. Like there are no physics at all, until I rebake. I just tested and yep it’s any file where I used negative frames to ‘settle’ the physics before the animation started. Good find.