yesterday, I contacted the SM people on some issues mentioned before, I looked closely into Stretch and I ran an cloth sim on Adom's animation.

@Gary: the issue is re-phrased quite well above. Please file it as a feature request at SM itself, I think they're not following threads like this for picking up user requirements.

On the copyright: when I obtain a dress (bought or free) I can make materials for it and publish them freely. But when I turn it into a dynamic dress, groupings and cloth-property details included, I cannot publish it without including the dress mesh itself. Or I should use RTEncoder and use the original OBJ for key.

@SM on the Reset button - it does not reset Stretch damping.

Known bug, will be handled in a future release.

@SM on the [Strat] field in the sim settings - weird results when you enter anything but 1. The sim still starts at 1 but the resulted are mapped to later frames in the animation.

SM completely failed to understand the issue, even after multiple rephrases. Given gravity, figure moves and anything else they see other place to start a sim then in frame 1. So you can generate a sim from frame 1 on and use it later in the animation. That only makes sense if the figure is not moving, as in cloth over a table, not clothes over a figure.

@Adom: I started the test applying the animation to Vicky wearing a long gown. Nothing special, but the dress did not behave well. To be continued...

@Stretch

I succeeded in doing the physics and math on Stretch resistance as well as Stretch damping, but I did not succeed (yet) in translating that to the Poser dial values and behaviour.  Next to that, I have not been able to find any cloth-related numbers (material characteristics tables) in literature. 

The best way to observe what happens is to hang a piece of cloth down vertically, and put the upper row of vertices in a choreographed group. Then just run the sim.

First it will bounce up and down, and then it comes at rest as the bouncing dampens out. You can measure that the cloth has enlongated, the bottom line of it has come down.

• the final enlongation is independant of the Stretch damping, it's about proportional to the cloth density, and proportional to the square (!) of the length of the cloth. This BTW is all in sync with the physics model. And of course it depends on Stretch resistance, the higher the value the less stretching occurs. This dependancy is less than proportional, each time you double the resistance the stretch itself increases by about 160%.

 - Stretch damping effects the bouncing. The higher the value the smaller the bounce amplitude, the sooner it's damped out and the lower the bouncing frequency. This again is in sync with the physics model.

For practical use this means that high damping just means less frames in the sim for a stable result, and in animation a more stable behaviour of the cloth too.

When I just look around, leather and woven non-rubbers (like denim, linen) hardly stretch, unless the weave is quite lose, like silk. Knits however do stretch a lot. In my impression the Poser defaults are far too low for normal blouses, skirts, gowns, trousers and so on.

@Friction

During my debate with SM I stumbled onto Tutorial Manual pg 166, which read for Dynamic Friction: 

Again using an example, Silk moving over a steel surface has low resistance, while cotton moving over skin or coarse sandpaper over rough wood has high resistance.

Which was exactly what was found earlier. The default 0.1 is to low, 0.7 is a better estimate. Again, Cloth Room is not; Clothes Room. The defaults are for clothing a table or covering a car, not for dressing a figure.

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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