Is it possible to clothify body parts? I'd like to try it in order to simulate ropes and/or grabbing effects. If so does anyone have an idea what the cloth room settings would be to simulate this??

You can definitely clothify body parts but it may be simpler to use displacement to simulate ropes and so forth.

I think there was a thread at some point in which folks tried to use the clothroom to simulate a chain, possibly a rope as well.  The main problem was that the clothified object tended to collapse in on itself during the simulation.  I believe a special (and rather unusual) geometry design was required to get chains to work even partially.

You could clothify a body part, but cloth body parts don't tend to handle well at weld zones, in my experience.  You'd probably want to try a clothroom rope with a prop, rather than a figure.

But I'm not altogether sure what you're really asking, I think....

I remember a pdf tutorial, but it never worked when I tried it...

It is really hard to clothify the body with success...I have successfully clothinfyed Terai Yukis breasts in a walk animation ( the 1st one and the low poly one) but most models polys are way too high to do this.

poser cloth room doesn't have enough control over the mesh as most would like.  I would like to see the cloth room expanded upon in the next version to allow for other aspects...not sure what but I do LOL.

http://darwin3d.com/gdm1999.htm

The pseudo-cloth and softbody examples here might serve as a conceptual foundation for trying to approach ropes or chains through Poser Python, using a spring system.  In some sense, it would be recreating the wheel of the clothroom with a more customizable (and simpler) form using the same basic ideas.

Cage tried to develop something from this, himself, but couldn't unravel the C code example well enough.  I really think it has potential.  (Hey - Ockham, ADP, nruddock, et al!  We need a smart person to tackle this idea!  :D)

The two awkward bits in doing soft body simulations would be building a volume mesh from figures (FEM packages usually deal with parameteric objects/formats) and getting the material parameters right (flesh isn't one of the usual materials provided as these codes are slanted towards metal/concrete engineering objects).
Collsions handling and memory required are also major considertions as they are with cloth simulation (probably more so).

The examples at the link don't seem to require any materials screening.  I did get a very basic test to work, for the spring system.  In terms of collisions, Spanki is working on porting some geometry functions (including point-in-tri collisions) to a .pyd file.  If that works out, we'll see a speed gain which might make something like this more feasible (in a very simplified application, presumably).  The examples use quick collisions with a sphere or plane.  Something like that would be feasible, I assume, albeit inaccurate.  Possibly good enough for rope dynamics.

Ah, I think the reference to material pertained to the physical properties for the simulation, rather than Poser materials handling.  I see.  That's a problem with the idea of accurate simulation of the physics, I assume.  One might get away with just fudging it, to create a result which "looks right"....  Hmm.

Quote - One might get away with just fudging it, to create a result which "looks right".

YOu'd almost certainly have to do this because the sort of values required would need to be estimated anyway as they're likely to be hard to track down (unlike those for construction materials).

For the examples at the link, input values are given for the stretch resistance or rigidity of the simulated object - much as with the clothroom.  Presumably it would be left to the user to experiment and find the proper settings for cloth, rope, flesh, or whatever.

I don't know physics, so I can't discern whether the simulation in the example is already fudging the effects.  Quite possibly he's already just estimating for results that look good.  In the examples, they do look good enough for my tastes.  It we could get simulations of equivalent effectiveness out of Poser Python, it would at least be a step in the right direction, I would think....

Quote - I remember a pdf tutorial, but it never worked when I tried it...

The tutorial Casette remembers is Poser Soft Bodies by RajDArge - it's in the tutorial section here. Your first hurdle will be getting the PDF to open. I found that although Adobe Acrobat wouldn't work, one of the alternative progs like Sumatra PDF would do it. I still haven't tried this yet. The method seems complex, and I don't understand the reasoning behind some of the steps. Maybe if I had the time to work through it it would become clear. :) ... Here's a crazy thought, off the top of me 'ead. What happens if you plug AO into displacement, with an offset to make it run negative?

Thanks to everyone for all their help and advice. I was able to find the aforementioned tutorial and am going to give it a try tonite. If Im successful I'll post some pics and any recommendations....