How does Cloth physics/rigging work?

Aberrant

So I've been avoiding any form of jackets, coats, dresses, etc. Because I have absolutely n idea how it works. I've seen some stuff on rigging the cloth manually, I've seen some stuff about simulation cloth with maya or blender. Thing is, I just want to have something simple, like a jacket with a bit of a tail maybe or a cape, And I have no clue if I should be looking into simulating cloth with maya, or rig it similarly to a body with joints.

Here's an example from "Paladins":

I would like to have something similar to this on my model.

Anny opinions/ advice regarding this?

Mark Dygert

That kind of depends on your end goal? Is that a game engine? If so, which one?

Unreal has some pretty good tools for doing cloth simulations and for simulating joints.

The Unreal Cloth Simulation workflow is fully integrated now too and is easy to use so you could try that out also.

Personally, for something so stiff I would probably go with simulated joints. That way you can get some of that secondary motion while still controlling how far the joints move and in which directions without having to worry them getting twisted up or having a heavy simulation running chewing up resources.