"Unless I am malfunctioning, I am sure I registered this number on the Do Not Call List."

Doh! Sorry about the question mark, lousy proofreading. Homer's Voice.

I think that was the perfect thing to say right there?

Oh, by the way, I was also wondering where to get Maya Doll! Thank you sandoppe! I'm off!

I think that Daz3d and Curious labs should merge instead of grow apart. While competition is good, CL has made the universe (so to speak) and DAZ the people and things that populate that universe. I am very sure that DAZ makes the best products available and I really applaud the whole concept of a universal figure that can be anything we want. On the other hand, CL has created a low cost super program that boasts features that are not available to a "low cost" customer base. They provided a great deal of content with Poser 5 (I saw names I recognized when the program booted), a figure family, lots of hair, pre-set materials, lots of dynamic clothing, etc. I am aware of some of the EULA history between DAZ and CL, but why would CL insist on a charge for hair, and face room driven products from DAZ when clearly the relationship was so symbiotic in the first place? These companies were not competitors, and should not become so. I don't see how DAZ is going to create a Studio that can touch Poser 5 in less than five years. I don't see how CL can increase the quality of it's native content to match DAZ quality ever. On one hand, DAZ/Studio (free perhaps?) with great content, on the other, software with powerful features, reasonable content. If the two companies merged, I think there would be less time/money lost to both these companies and all of the community, and the results would be incredible and realized much sooner.

I have come up with a direction for getting things to work. The animation I talked about is above all a test. The reason I start in zero pose is to eliminate the poke through possiblities, basically so I can see that there is no overlap. Once I have my settings down I can go back and eliminate this from the animation. Yesterday I set up 155 frame walk designer animation with V3 and Judy's nehru coat. I kept running the first 30 frames and spinning dials til I got it to go all the way through. Basically using the dials to fix one crash at a time. Since the crashes happen only to cloth room (not poser itself) this was not too bad. I constrained and spun dials til my sim calc times per frame were at about 5 seconds each. I noticed that if my calc times were going above 45 seconds or so, this was a sign that the sim was working too hard and I was not going to get a good sim. After about three hours of this I got a great sim (having eliminated the self inforced 0 pose). Using the manual descriptions of what each dial does, I was able to make intelligent choices for each dial setting. Results: about 5 seconds of animation. Thanks to all for help and encouragement.

Yes, yes. Things are better now. I took out hi res don and set a zero pose frame 1, then a stock fighting pose on frame 15, then a crouching holding gun pose on frame 30. I added the men's overcoat to the scene, then ran sim. At first I got horrible distortions around the shoulders. Then I constrained the waist up, and made dynamic from the waist down. I increased fold resistance, and shear resistance. Then ran sim and it did a much, much better job. The sleeves were not as fluid and so forth, but the top of the garment worked better if not the same as conforming cloth prop would. I assumed that the clothing should work since it came with the program, but it seems that each situation will need to be tweaked. I don't think it is a program bug per se, but I went though several crashes where the time counter on the sim would start going backward and forward and the whole thing locked up until I cancelled. I just had to keep trying til it worked. For nice cloth the time is worth it, I guess. I'm going to start with 30 frame animations to get the cloth right, then see if I can just add to the animation from there.

I zeroed in on such a problem, example, when hmann's crop top is used and the arm begins to contact the side of the top, this is when the sim fails. Hmann has said in his tutorial that one must constrain these vertices in order to avoid this. If this is the reason that sims fail, then it seems that it would be best if (in the case of strappy dress) that vertices around the shoulders and trunk need to be constrained in order reduce the chance of catostrophic collision. The bottom of the dress should remain "as is". I'm not real sure how this will look, but I guess it's worth a try. However, in the case of crop top, I have not even included the shoulders in the collision list (just collars), the cloth never overlaps, and still the sim crashes just as if they were included in the calculation. Note: this is just on a walk. When I go home I'll try a few things and post results.

Sorry. I have had my coffee now. I apologize for being snippy. It is clear a lot of experimentation must be tried by me in order to get the results I'm looking for, and I should not expect this room to behave like high-end software. I'm getting good results for walks and so forth, so it seems to work very well for these things. I am wondering if we might be able to come up with some dial settings that will work for much more dynamic animations. Do I need to make the offset high and the stretch values high so that dress doesn't slip loose? If the figure gets beyond the scale parameters of the dress does this cause it to fly off? I am seeing sims that drape fine, work fine for several frames and then fly off and crash the sim. Thanks.

Actually, that's somewhat accurate. The manual does not go as far a hmann's wonderful tutorial that comes with his Clothing packs. The comments I made above have been resolved, yet, I dare you to take a bvh motion file of a roundhouse kick, put judy's stock dress on a run sim. If the dress does not fly off in the first ten frames, I'll assume you or your system are better than me and mine. My local friend here is showing exactly the same problem with the room when any reasonably complex animation is tried. If you can spill dial settings for how this should work, (I haven't had time to try too many different from stock ones) I'd be happy to have them. I am trying to pin down an error that will be demonstrable on anyone's system and get back to post it. Thanks, C

I read this post and tried it out, and it works fine for poser 4, but not at all in poser 5. After exporting from the UV mapper pro to poser 5, I get to see both sides of the mesh, 1/2 the front and 1/2 the back with a diagonal separating the two. Utterly useless. I was hoping to deal with inside out woes coming from raydream 5. I cannot boolean or duplicate with symetry because this inverts polygons for poser 4 or 5.

Your idea worked, but I used hmann's 3d worlds squares to do the basically the same thing. I created a new post as this one is buried and maybe it'll help others too. (see new post). The problem is, now I've got a sky dome scaled so high I doubt I'll be able to make a texture map big enough. If it's not one thing, it's something else...

If anyone wants great pictures of the bottom of planes with landing gear down, within 100 ft, it sounds like were the place to to go!