hi nanette

once a dress becomes "at fault" it tends to get worse. Polies explode, sim time per frame explodes, everything goes. You can fix it, see the image attached. I promised to elaborate on my animation, but up till now no one welcomed it. Interested anyone? We can do your animation too.

This is the short version for you:

1. ensure the dress is okay.

2. ensure it fits at the start.

3. do have ALL THREE sim options checked (see image). Always.

4. don't move faster than the sim permits.

5. be aware of the limitations of cloth room (and know how to handle them, which is beyond this post)

Any poke-through of the figure through the cloth is a killer. Any pokethrough of the cloth through itself is a killer. Although the first few frames might take a while, the sim should speed up rapidly and run at a constant rate after that. Long calculation times per frame indicate verts going wild, and seeking their way out. Pull the plug, abort, the damage is done already.

On my Q6600quad P8, 5 mins per frame is my upper limit. First frames may last twice that long, but thats it. The counter tells you how long the previous frame took, at a zillion decimals precision (one of your earlier questions).

1. Ensure the dress is okay. Some props or conforming clothes turned into props, or just not turned into props, do not behave well in dynamics. They're not clothes but instant rags. The basic test: put your figure in a normal, relaxed pose. Dress her up, and pin the dress to the shoulder (or the pants to the hip) is just two points only. This is what the constrained group is for. Run a lengthy drape at default settings (all options checked). When it doesn't fall off or fall apart, it might do well. No guarantees. Lengthy is: the time it needs so look settled, and then twice the time. personally, i have no expertise yet in fixing bad dresses in Poser.

2. Ensure it fits. Again, figure in a relaxed pose, dressed up. use magnets and morph dials to ensure that you have no pokethroughs of the cloth with itself, and of the figure with the cloth. Now, all vertices of the cloth are on the right side (the outside) of the figure. Then run a lengthy drape. Check again for any pokethroughs. this will avoid a false start.
   This step is similar as #1, but in the first step you had enough just putting two cloth vertices in the constrained group. This time, you need to have all your grouping done as required. You can fix things by regrouping.

3. Check all boxes. Despite everything said in this thread and other ones the tab reads Cloth Room, not Clothes Room. It's meant for draping sheets over tables and cars, sheets being high poly, tables being low poly. The sim does cloth vertex to object poly coliision by default. Clothes are different. Vicky has the highest poly density in your scene, and the clothes will be relatively low-poly. So check Object vertex against cloth poly. Unless the cloth cannot fold at all, you need cloth self-collision too. Now, both partners in the collisions have about the same density (like Vicky and the dress can be about the same density too). Hence, check the middle option poly-to-poly as well.

I can elaborate later on the factors that determine calculation time, but having a lengthy calculation done right is always faster than a fast calculation going wrong ten times.

4. Move gradually and gracefully. You have to realize that after moving the figure from frame say 15 to 16, the dress still is in the 15-position when the sim calculation starts for frame 16. Hence, the figure is poking through the dress by definition, and the sim is about to repair. But it cant fix large areas, and extreme dispositions. A solution is to increase the number of subframes in the sim, its called Steps per frame (default 2, I use 5). But that's quite limited.

5. Cloth room has some limitations. Be aware. I'll name two:

  a) you can't move faster than the cloth permits. The sim is a real world representation and if its hard to do in the real world, the sim will fail you too. You cant do unreal moves in a real world sim. Period. You can change the cloth making, by changing its parameters. 

  b) Cloth needs room to fold, and the ability to do it. When Vicky sits on a chair, and the dress has no folds guaranteed somewhere in between, then the distance should be the collision distance PLUS the collision depth, at the very least. If it has a simple fold, it's twice that much. Within the fold, you might have polies which are too large to make it. Or the angles between two adjescent cloth polies might become larger than your smoothing limit in the renderer. Then the cloth will crumble (if you're lucky) or tend to self-collide and self-pokethrough. Then the crash is about to happen. Armpits and bended knees are famous. This just puts severe limits on your limb bending, and poses. Like in nature, tight leather jeans or velvet gowns limit your movements.

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though