Animate physics Lags my other animations

[josemendez]

this seems to be more costly on performance, is there any way to optimize this to run well with multiple characters with cloth simulations in a single scene?

Theoretically it should be considerably cheaper, since FixedUpdate() can be called multiple times per frame, but LateUpdate() is guaranteed to be called only once. I can’t think of any reason why it would be slower than the fixed updater.

Optimization really depends on what your bottleneck is. To determine that, profiling is the only way.
Use Unity’s profiler to check what is time being spent on. Once you know what’s more costly, you can reduce the amount of substeps, iterations, etc. If you want I can help with interpreting profiler data.