Fugazi1968 - thanks so much for the info!   i think it helps.  i know it's made me curious.  and it's certainly given me a lot to think about.  i wouldn't want to make clothes that way, i think.  i'm a bagginsbill follower, and i chose Adorana's method because it works with Loom and other procedural patterns as well as textures, and making cloth like it's clay tends not to work well with textures that follow polygon flow rather than UV.  it's actually easier to UV map than the method you described, too.  the stretching i get is purely due to me not mastering Blender cloth (yet), and it's also somewhat  realistic because it's where cloth is actually being stretched.  but i love the general concept and am seriously intrigued by the whole notion of voxel sculpting.  

i'm going to have to read your post through a couple of times to even begin to understand the workflow.  thanks again for sharing the information.  question: can you use 3dCoat to morph existing meshes?  or does working with it require starting from scratch?