Full story (no pictures).

After my first keywords into Google, I stumbled into http://www.animares.com/book/Secondary-Motion/Cloth/Hintergrund.html

Its in German, on issues with cloth simulation. His first note is that although regular meshes do fine in most areas of 3D, cloth simulation is not one of them. It benefits from a "Delaunay-Method" which gives irregular triangulation of meshes. It's implemented in Sim Cloth / Clothmesh, as Cloth Reyes / Hexamesh, as ClothFX / Cloth Panel and Maya / Cloth.

His second note, on which I wont elaborate much further, is to watch out for parameter settings and conversion. In short, if the parameters are determined for seconds, meters, kilograms etc and the mesh is defined in inches or internal (poser) units, then you're off. I'll let this alone, the Poser parameters are in metrics (m,s,kg) as I recall to have read somewhere in the documentation, and I already posted on the gravity matching the Earth surface conditions.

Cloth Reyes got my attention, since "Reyes" was referred to related with Firefly. So I found two interesting timelines. So; watch the dates.

Timeline One, on 3DS MAX

mid '90's, the Spanish REM Infografica launched for working on fluid dynamics. In 1998 the company split, the fluid people can be found later with RealFlow and the like. (interview http://www.cgarena.com/archives/interviews/3daliens/interview.html ). About that time, the remaining and renewed Reyes Infographica started to do plugins for 3DS MAX 2 (wikipedia + myself; I was into MAX 2 those days, my avatar was done then). Also see http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-725233.html.

For my story, the relevant ones are; Cloth Reyes with the HexaMesh routines, and NPR:Reyes, the renderer. NPR stands for: Non Photoreal Rendering (as in Toon and Sketch), and Reyes is a routine to make photoreal renderers with a minimum of time consuming raytracing (wikipedia).
From BB we've learned that the Reyes routine is in Firefly.
I guess the company took the algorithms name as part of there own: they incorporated the routines into their already existing NPR, then made products with Reyes in the name and rebranded their company. So: Reyes Inforgrafica did not create the Reyes algorithm but they incorporated the routine in their rendering product. Just to be clear.

mid 1999, release of 3DS MAX 3 by Kinetix. The merger into Discreet started then, mid 2000 we get 3DS MAX 4 by Discreet. (wikipedia). The Reyes' plugins were available till 4.2, I could find a date but the forumthread on installing patch 4.2.5/4.2.6 was on jan 19, 2002. (both: CGSociety forum,  http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-725233.html resp http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-1006.html)

It's interesting to note that 3DS MAX 5 had a completely renewed set of... rendering features.  So something happened between Discreet and the Spanish boys.

 

Timeline Two, on Poser

mid 1999, Poser 4 is launched by MetaCreations, but within a few months the 4.0.3 patch is issues by Curious Labs, the Poser people from MC which is splitting up. P4 introduces conformed clothing and magnets, by the way.
It then takes a few years, till mid 2002, before Poser 5 sees the light. A disastrous release full of errors, well described on JCH Digital Designs  in http://www.cocs.com/poser/poser5mess.htm, but that aside. 

Timelines meet

The interesting part is that P5 is completely renewed, including new functionalities like: Dynamics for Cloth and Hair including Wind effects, and also: a Reyes based Firefly, supported by new feautures for camera, light and materials, plus typical NPR features like Toon and Sketch rendering.

So... where did all that come from?

A few years later, Reyes Infografica pops up again, with a product called Poser Fashion (is has a Pro too, and made it to version 1.5). You can import Michael, Vicky and the whole lot, and make advanced dynamic clothing with it. Nowadays, the poser-fashion site has gone. (I closed the links on this, lets try to find them back)

So... why are those Spanish 3DS MAX guys into Poser?

You may draw your own conclusions, but for me there is a link between those timelines. So, ClothReyes might be a direction to look into.
Also interesting then is the association between ClothReyes and HexaMesh. I did not into the latter yet (it did nring up links too CAD engineering), but given our quest into tris and quads, hexagons shine a new light and will definitely fit into the opening remark, that too regular meshes don't do well in cloth sims. 

So far my share of today. Have a good weekend.

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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