I made the model, rigged for animation and weight painted the asset myself, so I know process used to create the SM in question start to finish. I cannot get my head around how or why this is happening. Things I have tried:
-Disabling any and all cloth physics
-manually adjusting physics collision pills
Looking over mesh in Maya to check for ngons, reverse faces and planar faces.
Do you have the forward bone rotation locked on the skeleton? If you don’t it could rotate the part between joints into a single point with the twisting.
It also kind of looks like it doesn’t have enough geometry to properly bend. If you want it to bend it needs the polygons to bend.
I will give the bone locking a shot, I am aware of the polygon to animation/ physics operation, and the rope is right around 34k tris, which I would think is more than enough. I will let you know if locking the bone does the trick. Thank you for the response.