I’m working on producing a character who is wearing a long robe. Properly weighting the robe so it deforms smoothly has been causing me significant problems. The robe itself is skinned to the CAT biped bones of the character. This results in severe stretching when the legs move up and forward, as one half of the robe is associated with one leg, and other other half with the other leg. In an attempt to resolve this I tried using a series of tail bones parented to the hips that control the movement of the robe, but this also runs into the same problem as above. Does anyone know a better method to rig a robe?
Additionally, I had been planning on using the APEX cloth simulation for the character once in-engine. Does the simulation require proper skin weighting for the robe?
You could create some external chain rig in order to skin the robe to them, and then apply a simulation directly inside Max on the joints…in is possible to do that ( just be sure to enable collision between bones so you have proper collision on the arms/legs ), so basically you’ll have a dynamic solution inside Max, but then you bake the joints movement so that inside UE4 everything works correctly.
Downside is that the robe will always be driven by baked animation rather then physics like Apex Cloth and yes, in order to use Apex Cloth you need to skin the robe, but its like traditional weight paint…there is an official tutorial directly on the nvidia website 
Plus: the matinee fighting scene is using chain bones in order to simulate the actor…skirt or whatever they’re wearing, check it out
