Hello all, a small team and I currently working on a 2.5D fighter game in Unity, and one (or several) of the characters have rather large/frilly dresses, and we're having a large big issue with how to handle how to animate them.

We've considered using the Cloth component, however due to the fact that some dresses have multiple layers/parts (note the apron in front) the multiple parts tend to clip through each other.

The other option was to bone the dresses and manually simulate->keyframe each movement. However, I'm worried this may be a lot of extra work for our animators and might be performance heavy. At this rate, this character, and a few others may end up with more than 100 bones each. Is that generally acceptable? We are likely to have about 2-4 of these characters on the screen at once.

They're all humanoid, and as with many fighters, a lot of actions have very high velocity and acceleration of character bones, which also made their legs clip through the dresses in various test animations when used with the Cloth component.

Is there any other alternative option for animating these, or am I just worrying too much about a trivial detail?