Hi, I still think about purchasing Poser 5, mainly because of the clothing simulation. So I wanted to ask those of you which use this feature . how much time do you need to run a simulation? Which hardware are you using? How many frames were calculated? And how much tries do you usually need to get a suitable result? I just want to get a feeling if it will be usable for me. Thanks in advance, Uwe

When I do a cloth simulation it usually runs for a few minutes up to maybe 15. I never time them, so it's just an estimate that will give you an indication. I use it for clothing articles, shirts, dresses, skirts etc. I use a 2.2 GHz P4 with 1 Gb RAM. I usually run it for about 45 frames. 30 frames for the draping and to get the figure in the correct pose (simulation starts with the figure in default pose). Then about 15 additional frames to let the cloth settle, makes it looks better. Usually, it doesn't take many tries to get it correct. Sometimes I have a change some parameters to get the cloth to behave properly and look like it has the correct density and fold resistance for the material in question. Surprisingly often, I get a good result right away.

How long? Geez, I've had it go anywhere from 15 seconds to 36 hours before I gave up and killed it (and it was doing stuff, just really slowly.) I've used it mostly on skirts. It usually does come out pretty good the first time or two.

Difficult to put a definite time to it. Generally just a few minutes, much the same as a detailed render. Well within the bounds of patience. In fact if I don't see the progress bar move at a reasonable speed I'll stop it because I know that there is something in the cloth/figure/animation set up that should be adjusted or corrected. It is a high resource task and will require a machine that is up to the required spec. I find that it works very well.

Fyre, That 36 hour thing is most likely the cloth room going into a loop. If the cloth gets caught between two collision surfaces the program gets stuck and though it looks like the simulation is still being calculated, you won't get any further. This tends to happen when cloth gets caught in knee or elbow bends, or when legs cross, but it will happen any time cloth gets caught between two objects it's meant to collide with. The only way out is a Ctrl+Alt+Delete. It's the big bug of the cloth room. You have to be very careful that no body parts would intersect getting from the default pose to the final pose you want for your picture, otherwise you'll lose everything since your last save.

Polycount of the figure and cloth is going to be the determining factor. I usually run 5 frames of drape and ten frames of dynamics to my final pose for stills. Using V3 and some of the more detailed cloth, it takes @5 minutes. I've been working with the less detailed figures ans lower poly cloth, and the same sim takes about 30 seconds. Extreme detail goes extremely slow. This is on an Athalon XP 2600 1.5GB ram.

Some of the time requirement depends on how closely the clothing item is to the final result. for example, doing a skirt that starts as a close fit is very quick and may take 10 frames. Draping a shawl that starts as a rectangle may take 50-70 frames. I try for about 5 frames where little movement occurs. It is fairly obvious if more frames are needed.

With my system, it's taken as long as an hour for a high-polygon cloth figure over a hires figure like V3 or M3. For a low res blanket draping over the P4 horse, maybe 5 minutes.

Okay, here's a 900 polygon rectangle (30 x 30 factes) draped over the Poser 4 horse. I had "Self Collision", and the two object options checked, and had Fold Resistance and Shear resistance set to 0 (for demonstration purposes). This entire calculation ( 30 frames of drape, 30 frames of "animation" from default pose to the one above) took perhaps forty five seconds. For reference, I have a 1.4 mhz proccessor and (now) 768 mb RAM

Here's a version with a 4096 polygon blanket (64 x 64 polygons, just over four times the polygon density of the first one). The same settings and the same pose were used, with a resulting average time per frame of nearly eight seconds. This took about seven and a half minutes to proccess. Note that it has much better wrinkles, and seems to be a much lighter type of cloth. However, as I said, it took more than ten times as long to calculate in an otherwise identical setting. I should note that at an even higher resolution (128x128 polygons, or more than 16,000 polys), the actual polygon structure of the horse became visible - because the mesh of the blanket was so tight, it had several polygons for each Horse polygon, and thus clearly showed the horse's faceted nature.

So it's safe to say, trimming the detail where it isn't needed is a good way to speed up the process. Valandar, thanks for the comparison.