Quote - Perfect example: if your NURBS-capable modeller has a "drape" function - try it out... in pure NURBS, it's damned fast... add a bit of constraint on half-edge lengths (so it didn't distort down to the floor), and it would be a golden example of what dynamic clothing could be.

One frame of any highly constrained and limited sim is always fast. Can you 'drape' with wind or self collision or in multiple directions in your NURBS modeller ? Can you get your cloth to be cut or react to cloth weight and weave ? Can you adjust it's shear and stretch resistance ?

Your idea, though cool, is founded on your assumption that the 'speed' you are seeing in drape is because of NURBS. While it is actually from the fact that 'drape' is to cloth sims what a 'pose' in poser is to a muscle system.

And NURBS are horrible candidates for any spring system anyway. Polys are basically a network of connected points, which you can simply map to the springs. What would you do with a NURBS surface with trims and stitched surfaces and what not. You would either have to tesselate it all to a polymesh, which is dodgy at best, or make do with the control cage which would be very inaccurate.

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The point I'm getting at is this: there is collision detection that can be done and represented in realtime (as in the humus.ca example), while even with Poser-like clothing, it can probably be done in far, far faster times than what we're seeing right now.

Sure it can, and is in advanced cloth sims like syflex. Which BTW costs 10x what poser itself does. And incidently, syflex a pure poly cloth sim. Tells you something doesn't it.