With the help of Kent Trammel's curtain tutorial, I figured out how to use the Blender cloth simulation and keyframe animation to gather a skirt for a dress.

The pink dress lost some of the pleats in the Poser cloth room, but the blue dress is conforming - that is the result Blender gave me.

Very nice great work

Thank you for posting this, Nanette. From my (as yet limited) experience, there is no question Poser smoothing as well as the sim works against externally-modelled pleats in the cloth room - the cloth sim in Blender is possibly a bit more sophisticated, Nanette?

Robyn, the cloth simulator in Blender seems to have very similar features to the one in Poser, although the controls are different. It took me a while to get my head around the differences. I don't think it is really more sophisticated.

Because you have the modelling features right there in Blender, it seems you can do more, using shape keys and keyframe animation to gather in the pleats.

I based this on a tutorial by Kent Trammel on BlenderCookie, where he did this with curtains and I thought I would try it with a dress.

I noticed that Blender's cloth simulator seems slow compared to Poser's - experimenting with it is time-consuming.

Vilters has a way of bringing back the pleat definition, which he posted in the Poser forum somewhere. It involves using the Poser morph brush to smooth out the pleats, then saving the result as a morph target, then after simming, applying that morph at a negative value. I haven't personally tried it.

Wouldn't the stiffness and weight of the material play a part in whether or not the pleats smoothed out or not?