I have a 1-sided and 2-sided mesh. it's a shirt. I simmed the 1-sided and wish to deform the 2-sided.
They both share the same UVs. Is there a way to perform the point deform capture step using UV space instead of world space?

I think this would prevent capturing points that cause shearing.

Using two point deform nodes (capture and deform) You could always promote your UVs to point attributes and then set your point position to UV position in vex before the capture, and copy back the capture attributes to your original mesh before the deform. Although this will probably create problems at your UV seams.

Have a look at the attached .hip file. You'll need to make sure the chipmunk .hda is loaded for it to work.

Thank you all.
I saw an Entagma tutorial (yarn ball) with the the method Tanto suggested. I tried that and had exactly the issue you suspected. the seams were borked. It would be more useful to UV space but keep the offset so if you have a shirt with thickness it would be captured by the closest point in UV space. I'm sure there is a way to do this.

I opened lucap1's file and it is what I am looking for! Thank you!!
it would be awesome if this was something that was available as a standard node.

Thanks for the suggestion, maybe I'll make into a labs tool. I put it together as pratcial example of how one might use vex in combination with attributes. Thanks for the validation.

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Not sure if this will solve your problem, but you know you can setup the capture weights for point deform on a "neutral" pose then use them on another point deform later. It actually has 2 other modes, capture mode and deform mode (default is capture and deform all in one step).
In my first photo, the hand was in the leg on the capture pose for my point deform, so of course the hand will stick to the leg even once it's moved away. On the second photo I used a point deform set to capture only on a tpose (or a neutral pose in your case). Later on I used my 2nd point deform node and set it to deform only. It used the weights from the neutral pose and works perfectly. Basically I am saying setup your capture weights on a neutral pose with no mesh intersections, then you can use them later on.