I'm trying to learn a little about dynamic cloth and something I see in my attempts to make it is that sometimes the polys on the cloth will explode.  What are some of the common causes of this and how can I avoid them?

Good question.  I'm still trying to figure out how to convert something into dynamic cloth.

there are some  great  tuts  on  dynamic cloth in the  tut section  here  in  rendo  and i  believe  Lady Little  Fox  has  some  excellent   tuts  on  dynamic  cloth

a mesh will come apart if ots not welded. Some conforming clothing is made in a way that will seperate during the cloth simulation.

If you import the obj file for any clothing item you can run a cloth simulation to make it dynamic.   If it comes apart you need a modelling application to weld vertices or add polygons to hold the parts together.

It may also explode when the cloth intersect with the collison object. When for instance a hand comes near the body or intersects with the body the clothing tries to move out of the way and may start to begin exploding. Sometimes it corrects itself but other times things go from bad to worse. Try to prevent intersection if at all possible.

Some purchased items, even from Smith Micro, fall apart in the cloth room because they have separate details. There is one outfit with a full skirt that does this - I think it is the Storybook outfit. The frill falls off. Some conforming items just don't want to be converted. I rather model from scratch for the cloth room.

I did some tuts on dynamic cloth, on my website www.book.artbeeweb.nl

most of it is in there, I just need to finish some advanced stuff. Dynamic hair is in there as well.

have fun.

Okay, this was a custom designed item I did, so it's all one group and everything is welded. 

jfbeute I'm not 100% sure what you mean by intersection.  Isn't dynamic clothing supposed to come into contact with other items? 

The problem occurs when you place the hand on the hip and you configured the entire figure as the collision object (without excuding the hands). When setting up the dynamic cloth scene you should always set up a short animation. During this animation the hand may actually penetrate the hip or come so close there isn't any space for the cloth to comfortably fit in (considering the distance it should keep from both hip and hand).

Also during poke throughs the cloths actually intersects (penetrates) with the collision object. Most of the time this fixes itself in the next frame (but not always).