It’s a great question and one I’d like to dive deep into as soon as we’re back from SIGGRAPH. Stay tuned in this thread.
In a nutshell, I’ve had the most success treating cloth - like capes - as a low-poly mesh. Where each vertical polygon edge is a joint chain with assigned markers. To keep it together horizontally, you either may not need to - it depends on the action - or it does in which case I’ve used Distance Constraints. But nowadays, with the release or 2022.07.20, I’d experiment with the Attach Constraint which might be better suited! It is able to maintain both distance and “bend resistance” via the Rotate Stiffness attribute, and is exactly the same physical properties shared between parent and child Markers.
I expect there will be a few techniques one can use for cloth, depending on the type of cloth and what it will be doing.
- Scarf, a single joint chain
- Skirt, a “low-poly mesh” of markers
- Layered clothing, box shapes, with each corner distance constrained
- …? To be explored! Can you think of any?
Here’s one (rendered) example. I’ve got more behind-the-scenes for this one on my other machine which I’ll share here next week, along with new examples and at least one tutorial.