marble:

Yeah, there is a little bit of a learning curve to get to know what works, what doesn't, what sims fast, and what sims slow.

It seems to me that everyone who tries out VWD just jumps right in with very sophisticated clothing without learning how the parameters can affect all the different levels of clothing.

My suggestion to you to see how VWD handles at base level is to start with Primitives props (plane, sphere, maybe even cylinder and box), and play with settings. When I test new cloth simulation software, I always begin simple, and work my way up to complicated.

A good test for you would be using the plane with a 10 X 10 tessellation (100 quads), and use for both vertical draping (like curtains - pinning mid-air [fixed vertices], and pinned to a primitive collision object [nail to collision] - try both variations and see how they behave - with/without wind, static drape, and collision object animated drapes), and flat draping over primitive props (dropping mid-air to collision objects on ground-plane). Play with the Dynamic Deformation tool within these tests as well to see all the different ways both variations can be manipulated.

Also, Gérald created a terrific tessellation algorithm (Sub-D checkbox/input box). Play with that with the cloth plane as well, and see how the different levels affect the simulations.

Don't give up. I experience the same issues you are seeing, and have only on a few occasions experienced draping as fast as you see in the videos. But, they were when I was using very simple cloth objects with low amounts of springs (hundreds of thousands compared to millions). Also, I have learned that when using the Dynamic Deformation tool that I have to click and hold the single lighted vertex (yellow - or orange-to-red for pinned) for a few seconds, and then slowly start dragging in the direction I want.

I hope this helps...