Quote - > Quote - Bullet - in that animation, is that really tearable cloth? Now THAT would be cool!

Tearable cloth?  Well, if one could predefine "tear points" to avoid the engine from activating on areas that you wanted to try to pose normally I think it might be possible, question is, how intense might the calculations turn out to be in order to get reasonably viewable results?

A very interesting premise though - have to add it to my work list and see what I can come up with :)  Naturally were looking at something here that probably won't make the alpha or even the first few revisions, but later on down the road it would be a great feature to have I think, provided one could work out all the details. 

Tearible cloth is seen running, presumably in realtime, in the video linked to above.  I'm guessing each vertex has a stress coefficient, and the polygons seperate when the vertex reaches it.  I don't know why it couldn't be made to do it along a designated seam, don't know much about it beyond what is shown.

I think the best estimate of reasonably viewable results could be gleaned from what the games are doing now.  Bullet is blender's physics engine and runs in real time there, so I have to guess the cloth is also designed to run in real time.  It may run quicker with less polygons than we are now used to modeling.  Maybe it would oly be useful for things like scarves, flags, or maybe it could be grafted to a non cloth-sim to make coattails or sleeves.  I guess it depends on how it works best.  It may handle a lot of low poly cloth sims better than one high poly one or vice versa.

I expect to find out what it can do when/if it becomes part of blender.