Another quick dirty test. I didn't expect it to work so well, but wow, is it easy and cool to wrap a clothing object around a body geometry, or what? This example here is simply: 2 clothing objects, each of them wrapped around a smooth skinned body geometry. The smooth skinning is far from good, yet, the wrap looks much better. And it moves well, from pose to pose. It's not for animation, meaning it takes a second or more to update, so it's far from real time, but it works really well, so the animator doesn't need to worry about the deformations, like with smooth skinning. Just have a rigid geometry rig for animation, and have the cloth separate. Since it only takes a second to calculate, the animator can also see the wrapped cloth, if needed... So the plan now is: have a body geometry that I smooth skin, wrap shoes and simple/simulation-ready clothing elements to the body, turn cloth nCloth, use some inputMeshAttract to have nCloth follow the wrapped cloth, paint some cloth properties, just to have some more fun (like a wrinkle map, the input attract itself, etc), and then wrap the detailed (extruded mesh, pockets, etc) cloth to the simple cloth. One problem with this method could be - you can't smooth the body with something wrapped around it. But it's not a problem in my case, because before rendering I export every piece of geometry as a geometry cache, and I smooth that. Clean file, render-friendly, and you can even sculpt the cache a little if you want to correct stuff or customize the look of deformations here and there. There's another problem - if you don't like the wrap's behavior... not much to do in that case, I think. There's nothing to paint... you can tweak the wrap's overall properties and that's all folks... (But you can paint things turning the cloth nCloth, which can solve possible problems.) Now, having nCloth follow a smooth skinned mesh is slightly faster, no wrap, but you need to paint weights much more carefully. More work. On the other hand, if the nCloth doesn't follow the input mesh too much, or at all, there's no reason to do this whole wrap thing. On the, yet, other hand (lots of hands here), one can use the wrap alone for cool looking cartoony cloth. The image above is just a wrap, no nCloth. Finally, the really cool thing about this workflow (with cloth objects being separate from the rest of the rig) is that I can interchange sets of clothes easily. Same character, different clothes. No need to redo the rigs.