Controlling cloth simulation

Here are a couple of screenshots of the scene described above:

The more I experiment with this the more bewildered I am haha. I tried pinning each short end of the ribbon, and the ends stay put, but the rest of the "cloth" swirls around almost as if there's a wind force field in the scene (there isn't). If I pin only one end, it whips around like one of those dancing tube guys on a car lot! However, if I increase the width of the cloth object to where it's something more proportional to a blanket, it behaves way more predictably. At that larger size with one end pinned, the cloth slowly drops down and drapes over the human figure, and more or less stays there as you might expect (without getting all ridgy and crumpled looking). I'm stumped and I have been messing with this all day now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This CGC course is really old but maaaaybe there are some useful tidbits inside with regard to simulating a scarf...?

Intro to Character Molding - Simulating the Scarf

I belatedly realized you want to have the fall animated. Oops! I would say that the probability of simply dropping the scarf object from a height and having it land in the exact position you desire is even less than if you were to attempt to do the same thing in real life. Right now the scarf appears to be behaving similar to how it would in real life...once it starts favoring one end or the other it's going to pull in that direction and down.

It seems like there would need to be something on the figure to attract the scarf toward it. Or, thinking backwards, get the scarf arranged the way you like it on the figure and pull it upwards...then just reverse the animation. Unfortunately I can barely get a cloth sim to behave just trying to fit a tank top so I haven't got much useful advice... :(

I haven't completed this physics course yet, but I did follow along with all of the clothes physics videos. I do get what coyo is saying, and the larger point about getting exact behavior in terms of physics in general. I played with it some more today and tried animating an object along a path, so instead of having the sash float down, it comes into the frame from the bottom and arcs up around the neck and then crosses over on its way back down. This works and it looks pretty good, but my goal here is to make this look like ribbon rather than a strip of hard-edged material. I wonder if I could take what I have here and add some sort of dynamic or "fluid" displacement that would give it some fabric feel without all the actual physics. I really don't need a lot for the look I'm after. This also got me wondering about geometry nodes, which is really interesting to consider in terms of procedural possibilities. It would be really cool to be able to adjust the parameters of your fabric style, length, width, etc. nondestructively. But, that's a whole other area of fundamentals I'm only barely getting acquainted with …

Thanks for the link! I actually started this course a little while ago, as something to explore in my free time (and I mean to get back to it), but I didn't think about it for cloth simulation reference. Of particular note, in the cloth simulation part 2 video at about 19:40, Kent points out how relieved and excited he is when the sim works because, as he puts it, sim reserves the right to behave completely different than it did in rehearsal. I think that puts the nail in the coffin for me, in terms of this particular approach for what I'm trying to achieve. I'm going to keep trying with the revised "sash" object animation path, and experiment with some PBR texturing and deformation. I did some exploration last night but it's still not quite there. At this point it looks okay, but the variations don't translate and look flat in the final render (could have something to do with my render settings), and this looks more like a toon shader to me.

Here's an update, at hour fift – oh nevermind – where I think I have it a bit more believable looking – though, if I were nitpicking I would do something about the edges of the ribbon to make them look more finished. I still haven't figured out how to build the mesh for the ribbon procedurally and have it instance along the animation path (curve). I realize I've gone off the rails and this is off-topic for where I originally posted, so thanks for hanging with me ;)

Thanks, Martin! I haven't done a lot with curves but yeah, I'm learning more every day. Right now I'm using a spiral curve, which I don't know a lot about but it's nice that I can just move the individual points around (while adjusting scale and tilt), without fiddling with bezier handles. I've made some progress with creating this procedurally using geometry nodes, but now I can't figure out why my scene render looks so different from my render preview. The fabric texture looks pretty good to me in preview, but then it just looks muddy in the render -- again, almost painted or wooden. Obviously there are a ton of factors that can figure into that, so I'm just bumbling my way through troubleshooting the overall look. That's nothing to say of actually animating the geometry, which I've yet to figure out.

I've tried it with and without. Here's a look at my setting with denoise turned off. Maybe it does help some. I also tried upping the samples to 1500 at one point but that didn't seem to make any reasonable difference. I really liked where I got with the texture in preview but I guess at the end of the day the texture detail might not actually matter that much, if the plan is to animate the ribbon and the camera focus will never be closer than this in the final scene.