This page was adapted  from the clothreyes manual.

Ever notice how doll clothing often looks too stiff, and somehow wrong? That's because small pieces of cloth do not behave in the same way larger pieces do.

In fact, any physical entity in the good old Real World will behave differently based on size, which is why 1950s science-fiction movies with giant people or insects always looked so cheesy (well actually, it wasn't the only reason, but it didn't help.) If those people or insects had really been that big, their motion and reactions to gravity would have been very different (and the crew would have been really scared.)

It's easy to observe this phenomenon around you. Try tearing off a small piece of paper or cloth and waving it around. It doesn't bend easily, and if it does bend, it will probably do so only in one direction, and it will "bounce back into shape" (what ClothReyes calls Torsion) very fast and well. A huge piece would bend much more easily, and the complexity of this bending would be much greater. As well, the larger piece wouldn't pull back into shape as fast, and may not ever do so completely. (A normal-size tablecloth stays draped over a table, it doesn't pull itself back into a flat plane. However, a microscopic table cloth made out of the same fabric would).

It is important to understand that in the case of real world fabrics, the density of the individual fibers greatly affects apparent size. A small piece of high-quality silk for example, which has very fine, closely-woven fibers, might react in a very similar way to a large piece of canvas, which has a large, rough fiber weave. This is because the number of fibers across the length of both the small piece of silk and the large piece of canvas would be similar, and the number of fibers per square inch greatly affects a textile's ability to bend and the speed at which it springs back, as any good fashion designer will tell you.

Until you started using a cloth simulator, size  was a purely relative notion. You might make one scene scled to 1, and another to 100, and one doesn't really look any different from the other. Your eye just uses recognizable objects or textures to determine the relative size of everything else in the scene.  Now however,  the absolute size is very important.

In this vein, the way gravity acceleration works in the real world should be considered. Two objects of the same shape, both made of the same substance, will fall at exactly the same speed, regardless of size. Galileo proved this in 1590 by throwing various balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

As an example, let's say that at a certain moment in time, frame 90, both tiny object A from TinyScene. and huge object B of HugeScene. (both having the same cloth parameters) will have fallen 50  units. This is all fine and good. However, in HugeScene, which is huge in absolute World Size, 50  units is not going to look like very far at all, and it will appear as though the huge object is falling very slowly. In TinyScene.Max, 50 units may constitute a relatively enormous distance, and the Cloth object may have moved completely out of view, or have hit the floor already and bounced back.