Maya nCloth (Bounce & Thickness)

So I have a two part question.

I’m using nCloth to do a sort of reveal on what is supposed to be models of a company’s locations.

Here is the render as it stands now: nCloth WIP

  1. Most importantly, for whatever reason, when I first made this simulation, I extruded the mesh (I think after running the simulation and baking it in) and it worked just fine. I did this so that my cloth could have thickness & also a golden material on the underside. However, when I tried to recreate this setup again, I could not avoid the sheet penetrating itself and showing the backface poking through the material. I tried playing with attributes like “Thickness” which didn’t yield any successful results, but instead just made my material look less realistic. What could possibly be causing this? I’ve tried various order-of-operations with no results. I’m essentially having to import the working simulated mesh into my new scenes, which I’d prefer not to do, just for the sake of understanding WHY it worked the first time, and why it isn’t working now. In the version that worked (seen below) I extruded the material, but I can’t remember when I extruded it, whether before or after I ran & baked the sim.

  2. Less important, Is there a way to reduce the bounce I’m getting? I haven’t played around with the simulation too much, but if you look at the render on the left-hand side you’ll notice that the nCloth kind of shudders as it goes across. Is this a “Bounce” property attribute?

Thank you!

Can you create the extruded cloth as a separate mesh and then drive the deformation of this “thick” mesh with the simulated cloth using a wrap deformer? I seem to recall that method working in the past.