I’ve been trying to nail a more natural, weighty feel for a character’s cloth simulation, but I keep hitting this weird point where the fabric just seems to float or stick to the legs in an unnatural way. I’m curious if anyone else has wrestled with this specific issue and what small adjustments in your approach made a tangible difference.
I know that feeling. In cloth simulation I saw the same cling where the fabric sticks to the legs or floats away. My small fixes are to enable self collision and increase the cloths internal damping so folds hold a bit longer. I also lowered the stiffness a touch and nudged the collision thickness up so the legs don’t pull the mesh through itself. Those tiny changes added weight without destroying motion.
Try tuning substeps and time scale. A heavier garment benefits from more substeps per frame so the solver resolves contact before slipping. Also adjust mass per vertex and gravity a bit and see if the fabric settles rather than springs mid air.
I’m not sure I’m catching your angle, but sometimes the problem is the leg geometry itself. If you’ve got sharp geometry or skewed normals, the collision response can pull the cloth oddly. Smoothing the leg surface a bit or padding with a tiny collision offset can help the drape behave without fighting the leg.
Challenging framing I wonder if the goal isn’t strict realism but a weighty feel that reads on screen. If so you could exaggerate a bit with a bendy constraint or a shading pass that sells weight rather than chasing exact physics.
A skeptical take is that tweaking tiny parameters often only masks a bigger issue like the cloth not having a proper seam or the animation causing jitter. If the issue persists think about a proxy cloth or layered approach.
Besides tweaks think about garment geometry and fabric type. A heavy weave behaves differently than silk in a sim. Quick tip separate upper and lower panels and attach them with pinned seams to simulate weight transfer.