Animating long sleeves without dynamics

Blendermonkey

Hi, I'm working on a project where characters will be wearing large garments but we won't be able to do sims on them.
I'm worried about how to approach the blendshapes without the final result looking like a giant mesh being flapped around (especially because some of the garments are made out of silk). Does anyone have example of long clothing done well without a sim?

Thank you!
refs:

Eric Chadwick

The workflow for this is going to be difficult without a live sim. 

I have seen a pipeline where sims were done offline, then converted to bone animation. Custom tools, and a lot of hand tweaking by a tech artist.

You could also look at spring controllers, secondary animation.

poopipe

I'd definitely opt for a sim converted to bones - I did it on a bunch of characters for a mobile app and it worked out pretty well. 
Provided you're not going for a huge amount of detail (I'd assume not as that would imply you had the resources to run a sim) you probably won't have too much rework to do if your sim is good. . 

I did it by constraining helpers to verts on my cloth mesh and using them to drive bones. 

Some simple scripting got it down to a reasonable set up time - the hard bit was making the cloth sim good