@EnglishBob

As i don't have that much issues with dresses and belts, I started an extreme test case. I'll make a full and illustrated description later, but just for short:

• PPro2012, using Andy2 and the torus prop for belt, positioned at the waist level, shrinking from 120% to 35% (frame 1-30) and hold so (frame 31-60). Since Andy2 hardly has a waist, any dress has to make sharp bends over the chest, between the waist and the belt, over the hips, down.
• First I took clothified the capsule prop for a dress, which was a disaster at all settings. The simple reason: mesh density aka poly-size. Since polys cannot make sharp bends arond an object themselves (you need more polys, and they can make angles relative to each other. Strong bends within a single poly around an object will be interpreted as poke-throuugh) this 'dress'' could not support the required deformation.
  Note that Andy2 and the belt in minimal position have a vertex-distance of about 1 cm (twice that of Vicky), the capsule has about 15cm per vertex.
• So i gave Andy2 a 'normal' evening gown (vertex distance 1 cm as well), and used some scale-dials to establish a fit since Andy2 has quite a wide chest. Offset 0.25, Depth 0.5 and please note that EACH collision object has its own settings, so these had to be set for Andy2, the belt and the ground separately. To support the dress for making the sharp bends, I reduced the folding etc and eliminated other frictions and damping. As the dress itself came in pieces, these had to be set for each piece separately.
• first run at say 2.5 sec/frame, gave a bit of poke-through on the body parts.
• checking "object vertex against cloth poly" solved this, it doubled the calculation time (5 sec/frame) but I was not very happy with the belt area, crumbled and rough.
• checking "object poly against cloth poly" resolved that to a great extend, and quadrupled calculation time (20 sec/frame). The remaining crumbling around the belt is due to the dress-mesh itself: quads again. Actually, we're asking the dress to do the impossible. Quads behave like leather, and I don't know real world leather dresses that can make such sharp bends and folds as needed this time around Andy2's waist.
• just for the sake of it, I'm running now with the cloth-self-collision checked, and the steps doubled to 4. Will take to noon tomorrow, Poser reports 1200 sec/frame. Good I did not include self-collision in the recipe :). Perhaps crumbling can be resolved in rendering, by increasing the crease angle for the dress.

please comment.

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

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