Quote - > Quote - Yes simulations are getting faster, but there are by no means lightening fast, and the more you ask of them, the slower they get.

Drop 2 characters in C4d, both with dynamic hair and clothing, and then tell me how fast a render you have.

Yes, I'll agree that those hefty polygons will drop performance in C4D (or Maya et al).  But unlike Poser, there are options to improve the calculations.  One old standby is use of proxies in place of the hefty geometry for collisions - a major part of the calculations by far.  It can be done in Poser perhaps using a low-res conformed figure or individually parented props - but as far as I know, Poser uses the figure geometry directly.  No idea how to use proxies in Poser for sims.

My plugin now has proxy creation support for just this purpose.  It can use primitives (per body part) or reduced polygon meshes (figure or body part).  The one thing that I have not yet had success with is making a reduced mesh proxy that bends with the figure - reassigning weight maps is not so easy as at first thought.  But reducing a 66000 polygon V4 to 6000 polygons in proxy definitely speeds up calculations while retaining a believable silhoutte for the collisions.

I'll just say that other solutions have better interfaces and are more flexible (no pun) than Poser's while also using more up-to-date algorithms.  These guys are continually improving their own implementations.  I don't know if e-f has to wait for improved support from the originators or has direct access to make such improvement (i.e.: the actual code).  I just did a cloth sim to show gravity pulling a cloth onto and then letting it slip off an object in C4D - yeah, I did that including a 240 frame QuickTime mov file in between posts here ;P.  With the cloth plane at 200x200 polygons (40000 polys), it did take a few seconds per frame step in the calculations - but at 50x50 (250 polys), about four frames per second.  Here's the mov:

http://www.kuroyumes-developmentzone.com/private/cloth_slip.mov

Robert

Hmmmmm..... The proxy idea is something that could be done. Nerd did very low poly covers for the hands and feet that kept the hair and cloth from getting caught between the fine mesh of the fingers and toes. Maybe something like low poly conformers with some adjustable parameters like scaling? The more universal something like that could be, the more likely it would be to be used... Something to put on the 'Ask 'eF for' list!