Any idea how to get the belt and dress to cooperate together?

You can add a contrain on the dress around where the belt is which will make the cloth behave as if there was a belt holding it tight to the body at that area. And also contrain the belt if you havent already-

My guess is that would give you the best result. 

Otherwise you could try to soft rigid the belt, which will make it follow the dress, but think that might end in unwanted result as the belt would appear to be very loose and unnatural. :)

If the constrain doesnt work try to post an image of the belt as well. Maybe before you have simulated the cloth.

Do the cloth sim on the belt first, and then do the dress. When you do the dress add the belt as a collision object. Make sure that the collision depth and offset are set lower than 1. I usually use .5 or .7 as my numbers.

A better approach is to not do a cloth sim on the belt. but parent it to either the hip or the waist, depending on where it's riding, and then do the dress cloth sim.

just a guess but make the belt and where the belt sets "loop of quads around the drees"
conforming.
make top and bottom of dress 2 diffret groups.just dynamic that part.

The belt is just an object around the waist. Ideally, the belt should do what belts do and restrain the dress. But not in this case. The dress sim will immediately envelope the belt like it's not even there. 3D Mobster has the same idea I did, which was to restrain the dress around the waist, but I really want to know why the dress isn't restrained by the belt even though it's set to collide.

okay, I admit I still have t resolve this, but from previous experiments I've found the following.

1. make the dress dynamic, and the belt just a collision target. Make the belt wide for a start, and then shrink it gradually in an animation. This is about the only way to keep the dress between the body and the belt. As in normal life: dress / shirt / pants first and then tightening the belt.

2. pay attention on offset etc. The dress needs no be some distance from the body as well as some distance from the belt, otherwise the sim might go nuts.

3. pay attention to the belt. Usually people make it a single sided object with no thickness of its own, and that't not going will in the sim. Make it a real 3D thing, with a thicksness which does exceeds the colision depth.

Technote: the sim takes a vert from the dress and keeps it some distance from the surface of the collision target. But in doing so, it does not have preferences which side of that target. So when the target comes close, the vert may jump to the other side of the target (and stay there). This is what makes your dress fall over the belt every time.

Giving the belt some thickness, and giving it some distance to the dress, does the trick. You must prevent the vert from making it to the outer side of the belt, then the sim will keep it at the inner side. In an animation you can first reduce the belt width, and then its thickness, to see where things go wrong.

have fun, and please give us your experiences in this.

I'd also suggest 3D-Mobsters approach, with constraining the dress to Roxie, where the belt sits on the dress and later then constraining the belt. The collision target of the belt is the dress, with a minimal offset as possible.

Then you first run the dress sim. and after that the belt sim. (if wanted/necessary)

I did tons of successful cloth room sims, with this approach exactly, using the dyn. cloth sets by this vendor here @ Rendo: http://market.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/?vendor=400165

     Reset the collision depth and collision offsets, from their default 1 to 0.125     It will take longer to sim, but the result looks better.  1 results in clothes inflated and floating 2" away from the body.

     Combine the dress and the belt as a single dyn prop.

     Make the loop(s) of the dress under the belt constrained.

     Make the belt constrained.  Engage cloth self-collision.

"The belt is just an object around the waist. Ideally, the belt should do what belts do and restrain the dress. But not in this case. The dress sim will immediately envelope the belt like it's not even there. 3D Mobster has the same idea I did, which was to restrain the dress around the waist, but I really want to know why the dress isn't restrained by the belt even though it's set to collide."

Here is an example of how you can do it. I created a belt and an old dress i had, so nothing fancy, but it will suit the purpose well. They are two seperate objects, which the colors show.  

So have imported both objects. And i have scaled the belt so its around the dress and victoria as well.

So in frame 1 i have scaled the dress to 119% and in frame 10 i tighten it down to 104%. The belt is really tight at 100% and will match victoria, so i leave it at 104% so there are some room for the dress, you can ofc experience with it, and also this is done really fast, so to avoid to many problems ill leave it like that.

In the cloth room i have these settings for the dress colliding. The belt is not part of the simulation yet, except as a object for the dress to collide against.

As the simulation is calculating, the belt is tighting around the dress. Since frame 14 is working fine, ill export the dress (Only the dress) in frame 14, and delete it from the scene, then import it again, so it now looks like frame 14 in frame 1. Then ill move the keyframe of the belt scale to frame 1 as well. 

Now the dress and belt looks like it did in frame 14. Next ill export the dress and the belt together. Using the above settings. Delete the old ones from the scene, and import the new combined dress. 

In the cloth room i setup contrains the belt and then i have selected the parts of the dress under the belt and just around it. So there wont be any poke throughs. You should probably spend a bit of time doing this correctly as i just rough it pretty fast. so there will most likely be poke through with certain poses. 

When that is done, you can calculate the dress as a single object like a normal dynamic object. 

yeah, nice.

One of the problems with thisngs like belts and even over lapping clothing in the cloth room is that if they are too cloose together the over lap may be within the collision depth and offset and Poser pushes clothified element out.. over the stationary object. Thats one of the reaons 3D-Mobster's method works so well. Another factor may be if the stationary object is double sided (polys face IN and out) or not.

On a seperate note this is part of the reason merchants as a whole don;t do more dynamic clothing. It's a steep learning curve even for veteran users and the merchant gets too bogged down with helping people that buy their clothing make it work correctly, or worse yet getting complaints that the clothing doesn't work as advertised.

A method of embedding ALL of the settings/information withing the individual dymnamic cloth pieces could help this but the last time I checked this wasn;t possible. If it has changed I would go back to working with dynamic of hybrid clothing.

"On a seperate note this is part of the reason merchants as a whole don;t do more dynamic clothing. It's a steep learning curve even for veteran users and the merchant gets too bogged down with helping people that buy their clothing make it work correctly, or worse yet getting complaints that the clothing doesn't work as advertised."

*Think you have a point in that, even though im personally a bit suprised that dynamic cloth doesnt seem to be used more than i get the impression that it is when reading the different posts on the forum. I would imagine that the marketplace was filled with high quality dynamic cloth. And thats where i think you have a point, there is quite a long way from just a piece of dynamic cloth to some of high quality with a good balance between details in the cloth and at the same time having an acceptable simulation time.

Which also requires that the vendor making the cloth can make it so that the cloth room gets enough details from the cloth to simulate it with good results. So the vendor needs to know how and where to add extra details to places where bending occurs and fewer where there wont be as many.

Like in the dress i used in the example above, if it was original suppose to have a belt with it, adding more details around the belt would have been a good idea.

If you look at the image below, which i actually think might be the same dress that i used in the example above, but that i have optimized. The amount of details you get with folding of the cloth is pretty nice, even though i might not have used correct settings, it would be near impossible to do with conforming cloth. If you think that none of folds are in the dress from the beginning. 

But guess its a matter of taste, i really enjoy using the cloth room and being able to pretty much take any piece of clothing and use for what ever character i like, by just morphing it to make it fit them and then some simple export/import. 

"A method of embedding ALL of the settings/information withing the individual dymnamic cloth pieces could help this but the last time I checked this wasn;t possible. If it has changed I would go back to working with dynamic of hybrid clothing."

*Not sure i understood you correct, but if you save the dress after you have added all contrains and cloth settings etc. They are saved with it, and you can add it like any other piece of cloth. But where you with conforming cloth would choose "Conform to.." you just make the dynamic dress child of the character you want it to be used with, and then you just make a cloth simulation and setup collisions. All the constrains and cloth settings, cloth groups etc are already there. But not sure that is what you meant?

@3D-Mobster

completely off-topic but still with public interest: how do you manage to get multiple images in one post, and how do you get them exactly between the paragraphs where you want them?

(I'm a dummy poster, I always get just one image, always on top).

Quote - @3D-Mobster

completely off-topic but still with public interest: how do you manage to get multiple images in one post, and how do you get them exactly between the paragraphs where you want them?

(I'm a dummy poster, I always get just one image, always on top).

If you're a dummy poster, then so am I. I'd like to know how he did that as well.

"completely off-topic but still with public interest: how do you manage to get multiple images in one post, and how do you get them exactly between the paragraphs where you want them?"

--

"If you're a dummy poster, then so am I. I'd like to know how he did that as well."

Im a noob poster as well, so havent really thought about it, and dont know how to explain it, but ill try to show it. :D

Then ill add another image the same way

And that basically just it :D

After you post if the text is next to the image just edit the post and press enter at the start of the text that are on the side of the image and then it should pop underneath the image and look correct.

haha, this definitely confirms that I'm a dummy poster :-)

And now I know how to make neat tables as well (button next to it).

Thanks !!

are post text is a wysiwyg html editor.
on the left there's a HTML tag.
so we can do anything we want how ever we want with HTML. :)

hi Rorrkonn,

I know about the HTML, but images must be somewhere on a rendo server in order to appear in a post, and one should know the full path in advance to reference them in the tag. And tables are just a pain in the html-@$$. Buth thanks anyway.

Now, let's return to the topic at hand: belts and dresses.

Can't ya link to a .jpg to show in post here that's hosted buy ya own we site ?

Humm I may be forgetting things, since I haven;t really used the cloth room since it first came out, except for occational tests. May be I really should spend some time in it and refresh my memory.

Thanks for the question and raising my interest again.