Although, I'm not sure how, or if, the Cloth Room can even work on a Figure?

I'm not sure what is supposed to be selected going into the cloth Room either?  My guess is the Body, but for reasons I'll explain in Step 2. I Chose Hip.

An other thing I may or may not have correct, before even getting to the Cloth Room, is what needs Collision checked On at it's Properties Palette.  I know that the Figure/Object that a cloth is making contact with would need it on; So, I checked it on for many parts of my V3 figure.  I also Checked it on for each part of the Skirt, though, also, because I'd like it to not intersect itself?

Here are some screen shots of my work flow.

1.)  Once I'm in the Cloth Room my first step is to click the New Simulation button; where I do two things, fill a name, and Check Self Collision.

2.) In order to tell Poser which object I want to clothify, I click the Clothify button.   My first instinct then  is to select the Body of the Akhyel skirt(2A,)  But once I do the selected element reads "None"(As in 2B.)  So just to get things rolling I click Hip, and move on?

3.)  I then need to click Display > Deformers > Hide All, becuase they all pop on, when the Hip then becomes the selected Element of my scene..  Image 3 are the deformers on the skirt, would these cause trouble?

4.  )  I then need to tell Poser what to colide the cloth into.  After Clicking the Collide Against button, I skipped that "None" dropdown, and went directly to the Add/Remove, button(4A).  I then chose the parts of V3 I wanted the Skirt to collide with(4B)  Now that I think of it maybe I could have sekected the Skirt again here, for self collision, but I don't think I did.  Would it have been OK to?  Then realized the Skirt had become entered somehow(4C), and quickly changed that(4D)  Then I clicked Ignore Head...and Ignore Hand..., before I OK'd 4D.

5.) Finally I clicked Calculate Simulation, it then calculated for an hour, but then coughed up image 5.?

It doesn't matter what's selected when you hit the cloth room, it won't affect anything other than the suggested choice when you set up a cloth simulation.

There is an option for Cloth Self-Collision, and you probably want to use that rather than picking the same item out of the hierarchy editor.  That is supposed to prevent the cloth from intersecting itself.

Phil Cooke has an excellent Cloth Room tutorial with video and voice (and a lot of stuff besides):
http://www.philc.net/tutorialsIndex.htm

I don't think hide/show deformers will affect how your cloth simulation runs at all, don't worry too much about that.

It is a good idea to check GROUND (or whatever other object might be your floor) when setting things to collide against; otherwise your skirt will drop through the floor!  :P

In general, cloth simulation works with single-sided objects that are one continuous plane, although that plane can be curved.  I can see from the model you have that it may give you some problems in the cloth room, e.g. the belt appears to be a different composition from the skirt.  I think Cloth Room can do that, by setting different dynamics for each chunk of material in your figure, but I don't know if your figure is grouped such that you can do this.  I've played with dynamic cloth a lot, but I stick to single-sided planes with only one material. 

If you can split the G-String out into a separate object, it will work a lot better (probably why your sim is failing is because of the G-String, from looking at it).  The same goes for the belt.  What this boils down to is that you probably won't end up with a single object for your clothing item, you'd have a belt and G-String that would be conforming, and a skirt that would be dynamic that would be loaded separately.  You can try to leave the belt and G-String dynamic I suppose, but since they are snug against the skin there isn't really any benefit to making them dynamic.

You probably will need to set a constrained group of vertices around the hips to keep the skirt from slipping down.

Thanks pjz99 - Thanks for clarifying.  I at least can narrow down the list of things that may have gone wrong!

I think I'll unheck Collision, from the Skirt's Properties Palette, becasue the New Simulation button has Self Collision, also? 

I'm sure I've been able to run a simulation through this figure, now that I think of it, but not since I've shortened the skirt so as not to hit the floor.  The belt's slipping wasn't too big a deal.  I really only want to make the morphs for the transparent/skirt part.

And thanks for PhilC's Tuts.!

I still wonder what's caused it to choke, though?

Quote - think I'll unheck Collision, from the Skirt's Properties Palette, becasue the New Simulation button has Self Collision, also? 

Right :)  Good luck with the rest!

Well it sounds like your cloth is breaking through at frame 3, causing the simulation to crash. The simulator doesn’t like complicated mesh geometry and when the cloth breaks through all hell breaks loose with it. I’m not too keen on morphs yet as they relate to the clothroom so I can’t help you there. One trick is to oversize your cloths in the first frame and bring it back to 100% when the pose tops off. It also sometimes helps to increase collision offset and collision depth giving the simulator more leeway calculation space. 1 hour is way too long, perhaps your geometry is too polygon heavy. It also sounds like you’re trying to clothify many different groups of clothing at the same time. The cloth should be one piece at a time. For instance: clothify the skirt part of a dress first then the blouse part in a different simulation then attach them together. I’m not familiar with your particular skirt but everything the skirt would collide with in real life, like the thighs, shins, hip, abdomen, buttocks, feet even the ground in some cases should be selected as collision objects. In your case it seems you also have to include the belt and G-string. No need to worry about a skirt colliding with the neck…well, usually but selecting the entire figure is what most people do but this gives the simulator more to calculate. The thing is to run a short animation. Starting say from the zeroed figure in the first frame and somewhere in the middle of the animation the figure will go through her pose, say a walking pose which will end on frame 6 of a 10-15 frame animation. The other thing to consider is where to put your constraining vertices. Usually on a skirt it’s at the waistband. In any case here are a couple of links to cloth simulation tutorials which may help you:

Harvey Mann’s  PDF download tutorial on Poser 5’s Cloth room 

John Johnson’s Salsa dress tutorial

Tutorial using one of Predatron’s products but helpful

PhilC’s Flash animations on dynamic clothing

Yeah, that's what I am worried about with the G-String, with where it is placed (ahem, between the cheeks as it were) it is bound to cause problems with being forced to collide through the character.

Before i went to sleep last night I did unheck all of the Collision, for the skirt's parts, from the properties palette, and ran the simulation again.  This time it didn't crash, but it ran all night and only made  it to Frame 5.(See pic above)  This time it managed to make some changes, but I'm noticing the skirt coming apart too?

Well it sounds like your cloth is breaking through at frame 3.

What does it mean when a cloth breaks through.  What is it breaking through, itself?  Could this be caused by the thong thing?*
**
1 hour is way too long, perhaps your geometry is too polygon heavy.*

I don't think we're too polygon heavy as the whole .PZ3 is only 20MBs. =  )

*It also sounds like you’re trying to clothify many different groups of clothing at the same time.

This is my next concern.  In step 2, after I click the Clothify button, I see two problems.  First is that there is no body part for just the rear skirt(Transparent white) part, and that actually the only part of the skirt that isn't named Hip, Collar, Shin, etc is the front loin.(See pic above ) And Secondly that the Body won't let me select it?(Step 2B of my illustration.)

I’m not familiar with your particular skirt but everything the skirt would collide with in real life, like the thighs, shins, hip, abdomen, buttocks, feet even the ground in some cases should be selected as collision objects

Yep, I was sure to check Collision in the Properties palette for each of those elements.  I also checked these same elements through Step 4b of my illustration. =  )

Meanwhile; I'm going to reduce this simulation to about 5 frames, try to parent the Body(?) of the skirt to V3's Hip, go ahead and ask As Shanim for his input, and read up on all of the wonderful tutorials that have been posted to this thread!

Thanks again guys, be back later!*

Parenting anything to anything will have no effect at all on dynamic cloth simulation, they just use totally separate guts in Poser.

"Break through"  means that your cloth item is somehow being pushed farther than it should go, and in the case of the thong, that is from frame 1.  Collision Offset is 1.0 at default, and it often is not too safe to make it smaller; any time you have cloth snug against the body e.g. the thong, especially when it is pinched between two body parts like the glutes, there just isn't any point in making it dynamic, because you do not want it to move.  That is probably what is making your sim run so long and eventually fail, is the difficult math involved in trying to find a safe place to put that thong string (think of the immense pressure those powerful butt cheeks are putting on the poor thing, show it some mercy and don't make it dynamic ;)  )

The skirt is dropping away from the belt because the mesh of the whole figure is not welded together the way Cloth Room expects and needs it to be.  This is fine for non-dynamic (conforming) clothing, but for dynamic cloth, the mesh of an object has to be one continuous piece or it will fall apart like you're seeing.  You see the same thing with bras and other items when you try to convert them to dynamic cloth.  I do not know if you can clothify only part of your item, but if you can, then I would suggest only the skirt.

oops, ps:  to make the skirt stick to the hips, you can set a constrained group of a few points to keep it from slipping down:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2844201&ebot_calc_page#message_2844201

Thanks again, this would have been another waste of time!

...show it some mercy and don't make it dynamic ;)  )

*Ha, ha, ha...O.K., but this sounds easier than it looks.  Is there a way to apply a simulation only to certain Material Groups.?  I think this is the only way we're going to prevent any parts of the skirt from being added to the simulation; as I'm not really getting the chance to designate what parts I want to, or not to, add to the simulation, and for few reasons.  One is that the Figure's parts aren't named further than human parts, and when selecting this skirt, from the Drop Down Menu the only body part that's selection will turn red after I've moused over it, in the document window, is the Hip.  At that the Hip Selection Highlight constitutes the whole figure.  The second reason I don't think we can use the Figure Parts to designate anything is because I'm only getting one choice after I click Clothify?  And third the Material groups actually do make a lot of sense, and actually work to separate obvious parts of the figure(See pic.)

The skirt is dropping away from the belt because the mesh of the whole figure is not welded together the way Cloth Room expects and needs it to be.

Thanks, that was very definitive, you ay have saved me a lot of time!

I do not know if you can clothify only part of your item, but if you can, then I would suggest only the skirt.

*The Skirt is the only part of the figure I want to clothify, really!  I do hope we can get at this through the Material Groups.  I see something about this in one of PhilC's Tuts., but it's hard to tell what controls he was referring to!

I don't know if you can apply cloth simulation to only part of an object (I think probably not, but I've never tried it).  If you can't, then one option would be to open the mesh in a modeling app, and split it into two files; import those into Poser, and run your simulation just against the skirt; export the results, and take them back into a modeling application again; and merge/weld them together again.  It won't be simple, but I don't think you have any easy project in front of you any way you look at it.  I think it is likely that the morphs you make will be incompatible with the old version of the skirt no matter what you do, but I've never tried any of this myself so it may be easier than I think it is.

Quote - *The skirt is dropping away from the belt because the mesh of the whole figure is not welded together the way Cloth Room expects and needs it to be.

Thanks, that was very definitive, you ay have saved me a lot of time!

I do not know if you can clothify only part of your item, but if you can, then I would suggest only the skirt.

*The Skirt is the only part of the figure I want to clothify, really!  I do hope we can get at this through the Material Groups.  I see something about this in one of PhilC's Tuts., but it's hard to tell what controls he was referring to!

Try adding one or two rows of vertices from where the skirt part meets the hip to the Choreographed group.
This effectively takes them out of the simulation and puts them back under the full control of the dials etc.

Hmm, if that works that way, then I guess you WOULD want to parent the skirt figure to the character, to make the whole thing want to follow the figure around?

I'm going to stop giving advice because you're really into territory I don't know, but I am very interested in what you discover.

*How about only through a Material Group?

**I tried applying the simulation through only the "Skirt" material group; with the "New Dynamic Group" button(Circled,) by clicking it and then entering the name of the group I want to use.  But this was merely trying to be intuitive, and did fail miserably...

I'm definately still doing something wrong in Poser.  Even after having reduced the Frame Count to 3 frames, my simulations still run on for hours?
**
***one option would be to open the mesh in a modeling app

Thanks again pjz99, but I havn't learned a Modeler yet.  I'd rather not begin another learning curve beside Poser, at that I'm stuck between Maya and Carrara.  I just don't know enough of either to begin practicing enough to become efficient..;  )

That's unfortunate :(  If your simulation is taking more than 1 minute per frame, you are in a bad way and something is very wrong (probably that poor thong string).

Good luck with whatever else you try...

From the screenprints posted, it looks to me the waistband is way too big. Is it meant to be that huge?

BTW - The simulation never worked, but Poser's Magnets did!  Which yTran do you guys like best 1, 2, or 3?