Pleated skirts: dev caps stride at 0.2, calls cloth sim overkill

The chapter sits inside a longer book about building a knee-length skirt that survives walking, running and crouching in a game. Earlier chapters established that cloth simulation mainly preserves thread length, which is enough to hold a simple tube shape. Pleats break that guarantee: a zigzag folded from one sheet keeps every thread length identical whether the fold faces out or in, so the solver sees no violation to correct. Adding ordering rules to fix this made the rules fight each other, pushing folds flat and flipping them again. The author measured 5 pleat types at 4 lengths across standing, walking, running and crouching, and found no cloth failures, but 36 combinations still misbehaved. Rather than chase those to zero, the author argues the remaining work is tuning motion and stride, not fixing the mechanism, and stops there. A separate problem is geometric: a 1.34 m hem cannot wrap legs that need 1.98 m at full sprint, so the skirt was made to slow the character instead of the animation being fixed. For the tight ankle-length case, the author concludes that a garment impossible in reality is also impossible in simulation, and settles for a shuffle.