Its usually because the rendering starts the simulation.
Anytime something starts to simulate, if any collision is interpenetrating or colliding it will literally explode.
Its trying to get to where it should be, but in one frame, basically.
For any rendering/take, you usually let a model sit 30 seconds or more before begginging a recording, to ensure that simulations are somewhat stabilized.
That’s because 30sec wait usually beats the hour or 2 of time you have to put into modeling whatever it is that’s not working right.
And because renders usually don’t involve making an actual product.
If you were the maker of said product, you’d probably have to fix the issue(s) instead.
As far as cloth goes.
Apex cloth in engine was never made to work correctly, so if you come from a renderer that uses Nvidia’s system, import the same values, and are like “wtf is this”?
Well, thats the engine. They spend time and money bringing lawsuits to little kids (minors) for cheating on fortnite instead of working on the engine, so what does anyone expect?
If you are on Chaos,
Well, in a lot of ways its better in terms of what works. For rendering purposes.
They just don’t have any performance down what so ever with over an 80% drop from Physx.
Chaos cloth however offers more features on paper - and probably less control than Apex.
I havent checked, but I doubt they implement backstop or any of the other values that would help.
Though for your case, chaos cloth allows world collision - so it is possible to have it not interpenetrate che character mesh by configuring it correctly.
Imho, you should just edit the model and remove any mesh that is under the clothing.
It takes maybe 10 minutes if you know how, so its not a 30s solution, but it would fix all clipping problems forever…