Hi Misty,

I haven't tried using point force for wind, I'm afraid. Gravity's direction can be changed, however, and it's value needn't be real-world. So a flag can look like it's blowing if gravity is set sideways. In Carrara, I don't recall there being a collision distance - I used to know this stuff quite well but forget now.

OK I just opened up Carrara - I think it is the 'margin' slider in the soft body modifier but you tried that already.

I used to generally try simulations of V4 sized cloth starting with stiffness around 27% and bending to zero or just above. The mesh would be well-tessellated.

If the mesh stretched like goo I would increase stiffness first, then bending. That was just my way, though, from trial and error.

Ultimately, I think soft-cloth in Carrara will always be time-consuming. A member now banned from DAZ once said that one of the Beta versions of Carrara 8 actually had better physics than the version that was released. Animated figures could be draped without messing up the simulation. It's a shame if that was true - Carrara would have had results like the cloth room in Poser.

Regarding Poser cloth sims, I found that I could use the dyn_to_morphs utility for Poser to send cloth-room animations to Carrara. The utility sends the whole Poser scene out to where it can be opened in Carrara complete with animation and simulation.

Two things I found:

(1) I found it best to go on and export the animated, simulated figure from Carrara as .fbx and then import it into a new Carrara scene. Otherwise the figures were starting out at point (0,0,0). Once I had it saved as an independent .fbx, I could scale it, duplicate it and place it anywhere giving it a starting point other than (0,0,0).

(2) I had to set the frames per second in Carrara to be the same as Poser's. Otherwise the clothing and figure got out of sync.

The best cloth sim of all is VWD, I would say.