Tomas Slancik

use RigPose SOP

- you can either take advantage of control points being in a hierarchy if you animate tail or somethin
- or turn on World Space and animate each point independently

gordig
I found some time to try out Vellum Tet sims, and I'm having three problems with it:

1. I can't figure out how to set the strength high enough that the figure holds its shape well enough for my liking
   
2. Because of #1, I also can't scale the stiffness with attributes such that the only parts that deform are the ones I want to deform.
   
3. Regardless of #1 and #2, I can't figure out how to run the animated figure through the simulation. I'm guessing I'll have to simulate the figure in base pose, then drive the simulated figure through a point deform, much like with a FEM sim.
   

1. your figure seems pretty stiff, probably more than you need so I don;t think it needs to be stiffer
2. you don't need to vary the tet stiffness to get what you are after, what you want is to add Soft Pin Constraint with Match Animation checked and let that define what parts follow the animation of target geometry with full stiffness ( areas aroud "skeleton") and which are completely free, or anything inbetween
so if you use your "targetstrength" parameter for that make is 0-1 mask as stiffness scaling parameters are applied logarithmically

3. Pin To Target Constraint with Match Animation on and control the stiffness like mentioned in 2.

to optimize the setup you can also use Hard Pin constraint for points that you want to fully follow animation (like areas around "bones") instead of having those also be very stiff soft pin constraints, however you may run into some issues and jitter if you force hard constrained points into some impossible situations

erikmlv
I found what it seems an old SOP called "CaptureCorrect" but that seems to be tailored to OBJ level bones.
Is there a "contemporary" way of setting max number of influences?

you can still use Capture Correct SOP should work fine on capture attribute from Joint Capture Biharmonic

or if you want more control modifying weights overall you can use Capture Attribute Unpack -> Wrangle -> Capture Attribute Pack