Workflow: Cloth simulation without disabling armature The typical workflow for cloth is to have areas that are attached to the body be Pinned, and influenced by an armature limited to the Pinned group. The rest of the garment would not be influenced by the armature. An example of this would be a skirt or baggy pants with a pinned waistband, but the rest unpinned and uninfluenced by the armature.

If you have the full garment rigged to the armature and run the cloth as well, then you get the movements of the cloth AND the armature adding together, which makes problems and is not accurate.

This presents the limitation that you cannot put the character into any poses without running the simulation to get them there. This means that before the start of every animation, you need to add extra frames to get the character from their rest pose into the pose for the start of the animation. It would be nice if you could pose the character with the armature into the start pose (granted this may deform the cloth in bad ways, but it often won't matter) and then run the rest of the animation from that start point. But to do this right now, you need to apply the armature as a shapekey or something and then disable it because if you leave the armature active during the rest of the animation, then you'll mess up the cloth sim as described above.

Is there a way around this issue? Is it possible to have the cloth sim start from the posed mesh, but ignore the armature for the rest of the animation (except in pinned areas)? Or some other workaround?
Option A: Cache and export to Alembic. But still have to wait 50+ frames for the collision to happen. There´s no instant "anything" on 3D. Never fall for that trap.

Option B: To my understanding that "pre-simulation" until the cloth is calculated and "rest" to the collisions, HAS ALWAYS BEEN LIKE SO IN ANY 3D APPLICATION. Yes, you need to let some previous frames to calculate, rest, and then get the character to pose. EVEN MARVELOUS DESIGNER works like that. So comparing it to Blender, you´ll have to wait to frame 75 or so, until the cloth "rests" to the collision.