hi @ashwath !
sorry for the late reply..
This is how i would approach the sim.
For the metal and cloth i treat them in separate sim layer. Rather including it in mus+Fat sim (mainly for speed of sim). Skin/fat cache will come as zBone and drive the metal and cloth objects.
- Metal strips will be a separate objects for both the sides of cloth and will have some weak attachment between them so that it wont move far apart in extreme pose. You will need to test it out to get the value.
It will have tissue with material's young modulus increased say 12x104 or so.
since zTissue is used on metal, its advisable to to have water tight mesh. So have some thickness plate.
cloth will be separate object having dense segments( preferably well triangulated to get good wrinkles)
it will have strong attachment from both the metal.
Play around with material of zcloth to get the feel of cloth and wrinkles
You might face problem with zCloth like penetration with skin. To tackle it u need to increase the subsets ( which might result in high simulation time) and increased the collision stiffness parameter.
for this i approach differently like having a duplicate cache of body skin (as another bone) with some offset with original skin cache. This double layer collision did help me to avoid penetration. But yes this is still experimental but for this purpose it helped.
Below is the mock up setup for ur reference