I have got a problem with the cloth room. I have a still set up that ends on frame 5. I worked on my image, made sure that pose was correct, all was well. I saved the pz3. I went back to the file to do some more renders, and lo! the cloth was not on the figure anymore! I had to rerun the sims. Is there any way to correct this? Also, does anyone have any thoughts on how in the world this cloth room could possibly be used for animation? For example, how could two animations be linked so as to appear seemless? It seems like you have to have at least 5 dummy frames in front of any sequence for the cloth to drape on the figure in the 0 pose.

You don't need dummy frames to drape the cloth.

Just specify a few drape frames in your Simulation Settings, then enable the "Start draping from zero pose" option in the Collide Against dialogue. Poser will do the draping calculations before it starts calculating the actual posed animation.

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caravaggio, you need to read the manual. Your cloth room woes are purely 'you' issues and can be resolved with a little lite reading.

Actually, that's somewhat accurate. The manual does not go as far a hmann's wonderful tutorial that comes with his Clothing packs. The comments I made above have been resolved, yet, I dare you to take a bvh motion file of a roundhouse kick, put judy's stock dress on a run sim. If the dress does not fly off in the first ten frames, I'll assume you or your system are better than me and mine. My local friend here is showing exactly the same problem with the room when any reasonably complex animation is tried. If you can spill dial settings for how this should work, (I haven't had time to try too many different from stock ones) I'd be happy to have them. I am trying to pin down an error that will be demonstrable on anyone's system and get back to post it. Thanks, C

Sorry. I have had my coffee now. I apologize for being snippy. It is clear a lot of experimentation must be tried by me in order to get the results I'm looking for, and I should not expect this room to behave like high-end software. I'm getting good results for walks and so forth, so it seems to work very well for these things. I am wondering if we might be able to come up with some dial settings that will work for much more dynamic animations. Do I need to make the offset high and the stretch values high so that dress doesn't slip loose? If the figure gets beyond the scale parameters of the dress does this cause it to fly off? I am seeing sims that drape fine, work fine for several frames and then fly off and crash the sim. Thanks.

In my experments with the cloth room and BVH I found that there can not be much if any overlap between the parts of the cloth or between the cloth and the figure in question.

I zeroed in on such a problem, example, when hmann's crop top is used and the arm begins to contact the side of the top, this is when the sim fails. Hmann has said in his tutorial that one must constrain these vertices in order to avoid this. If this is the reason that sims fail, then it seems that it would be best if (in the case of strappy dress) that vertices around the shoulders and trunk need to be constrained in order reduce the chance of catostrophic collision. The bottom of the dress should remain "as is". I'm not real sure how this will look, but I guess it's worth a try. However, in the case of crop top, I have not even included the shoulders in the collision list (just collars), the cloth never overlaps, and still the sim crashes just as if they were included in the calculation. Note: this is just on a walk. When I go home I'll try a few things and post results.

Keep working at it; if it isn't a bug with Poser itself, you'll figure it out eventually. I had problems at first, also, and didn't seriously give the Cloth Room another try until last month.

Yes, yes. Things are better now. I took out hi res don and set a zero pose frame 1, then a stock fighting pose on frame 15, then a crouching holding gun pose on frame 30. I added the men's overcoat to the scene, then ran sim. At first I got horrible distortions around the shoulders. Then I constrained the waist up, and made dynamic from the waist down. I increased fold resistance, and shear resistance. Then ran sim and it did a much, much better job. The sleeves were not as fluid and so forth, but the top of the garment worked better if not the same as conforming cloth prop would. I assumed that the clothing should work since it came with the program, but it seems that each situation will need to be tweaked. I don't think it is a program bug per se, but I went though several crashes where the time counter on the sim would start going backward and forward and the whole thing locked up until I cancelled. I just had to keep trying til it worked. For nice cloth the time is worth it, I guess. I'm going to start with 30 frame animations to get the cloth right, then see if I can just add to the animation from there.

Caravaggio, I might be reaching here. Consider the length of your animation and the dynamics your requiring from that cloth. I don't have the details of you simulation but going off what you posted about how you set it up...well... I dunno. Choosing a pose at frame 15 and another at frame 30 is fine, the problem resides in the fact that, well... That is only half a second of animation. Sure the dynamics are a big help in how it will interact in the animation but I think it is one thing to go from pose A to pose B in 2-3 seconds rather than expecting 15 frames to truly give you what you need. Also, you don't need to be set to zero at frame 1 for your sim to work/drape properly. The draping process put your figure at zero pose (if checked) when it starts calculating the drape. If you need more drape time, up it. Also up your stepping, its like drape frames for drape frames i think. I'm not saying you need to change this, just give that some though is all. :) glad things are working out for now.

I have come up with a direction for getting things to work. The animation I talked about is above all a test. The reason I start in zero pose is to eliminate the poke through possiblities, basically so I can see that there is no overlap. Once I have my settings down I can go back and eliminate this from the animation. Yesterday I set up 155 frame walk designer animation with V3 and Judy's nehru coat. I kept running the first 30 frames and spinning dials til I got it to go all the way through. Basically using the dials to fix one crash at a time. Since the crashes happen only to cloth room (not poser itself) this was not too bad. I constrained and spun dials til my sim calc times per frame were at about 5 seconds each. I noticed that if my calc times were going above 45 seconds or so, this was a sign that the sim was working too hard and I was not going to get a good sim. After about three hours of this I got a great sim (having eliminated the self inforced 0 pose). Using the manual descriptions of what each dial does, I was able to make intelligent choices for each dial setting. Results: about 5 seconds of animation. Thanks to all for help and encouragement.