How to twist a cloth? I am starting to get pretty stressed and sad. This is for a mobile game I have accepted a project for and if can't solve this I might have to drop this project which will cost me a bit. So if you could help me it will mean a TON! :)

I am trying to make a cloth look like this.


What I did is I created a cloth simulation with enough vertices and required cloth settings.
Then followed this video to parent some vertices to a bone. To make it work I had to add the bone to the pin group. I animated the bone to rotate so it will mimic the pinch and rotate movement you will do in real life.

After that with some objects with a collision component I have restricted the movement above so it wouldn't clump up and also used a cylinder in the center.

I tried using some vortex force fields but I didn't do that much. Or I don't know how to use them.

You can check this video to see how far I got with the simulation.

If you want to try yourself you can download the .blend file.
To note that both quality settings are set to 100 so it will take a while to bake.

Update: I made some progress but not enough. Using some wind to push the cloth up and more bones. The bones are animated from the edge of the cloth to a small circle in the middle, but there is a lot of loose cloth remaining on the edges. You can watch this video to see.

Thank you :)
Probably not serious answer, but easier to explaine. What about to add one collision object?

Example with only one bone (your blend) plus Cylinder as collider, bad timing and probably better to use some less circle shape, but you got idea.





For final shape you can try Modeling Cloth addon, you can "model" shape in a realtime, final shape is stored as shapekey. So no way to just do animation with two shapekeys O-1, the transition wouldn't work for you.

You can try some combination of your baked cloth sim + shapekey from this addon, somehow ... export to MMD, assign to a mesh via Mesh Cache works, than I wanted to use Surface Deform modifier after that (for target object shaped in state of end of simulation with adjustments as shapekey), but they doesn't run together.

It's really hard to understand how ideal result should looks like :)