since it seems that you are not starting your animation with the cloth directly against the cylinder, Im thinking perhaps you should be using a choriographed and not a constrained group. set the cloth to collide with both the cylinder and the ground than set the row of vertexes that you wish to stick to the cylinder to be a choriographed group, start the cloth in frame 1 where you want it to fall from. than decide what frame that you think the cloth should come in contact with the cylinder, and in that frame move it to just about touching the cylinder, making sure that your choriographed vertexes are lined up with the cylinder than run your simulation allowing enough frames after your second key frame to let the cloth drape the way you want.

You can, do just what you want, there are two programs Injection Pose Builder and Injection Magic, both availible at DAZ which will allow you to save a custome character to your figure library than use the tool to create a morph pose which both loads all the injections and sets the dials, once you have don that you can apply that pose directly to an unloaded V3 and only those morphs will be loaded. any morphs in your original figure that are set to zero get ignored by these tools so dont get loaded.

very good point EnglishBob, and one I have always believed in (though practice is a little harder.... OOH pretty new tools! 80 ) Learning the software you have inside and out, makes a lot more sense than jumping around and trying everything but not getting really good at any one platform. even rudimentry modeling software can end up with great results if you take enough time working with it, wereas you could have the greatest tool in the world with every option known and if you only are comfortable with one percent of the tools you will be far less likely to get much accomplished.

I model almost exclusively in CINEMA 4D I find it one of the easiest interfaces to deal with, and its got one of the best collections of modeling tools on the market that I have found. I dabble in Modo and ZBrush, but don't tend to use them for finished work. I guess now I will have to give Hexagon a shot. ;) It does look to have some useful stuff. I also have lightwave 8 and Silo, but neither ever clicked for me.

Mickmca, you might want to double check those bryce deals its not 5.5 for 19.95 its bryce 5.0 for 19.95 and Bryce 5.5 for 59.95. here is one of the several stores offering that Special. http://www.3dcommune.com/3d/page.mv?/3d/_pages/daz3d.html

yes Daz will honor preorder deals.

as far as modeling software goes I have been told that Hexagon is one of the easiest modelers to learn, I found it pretty easy but than I have been modeling for a few years now and am not sure how much that effects my learning curve.

Quote - Interesting.  What does this mean?

DAZ Productions is not acquiring Eovia Europe S.A.

it just means that Eovia Europe is still a seperate company with ownership of Amapi, DAZ only purchased the California division of Eovia which I have been told is where Carrara and hexagon are developed, as well as hexagon and Carrara themselves.

huh? I have to do that every time I visit the forum? but what If I dont have time to read every thread that catches my interest in one session, than I have to remember the ones I read or didnt read when I come back. Thats a bit of a hassle. OK I understand how it works now but I would like to put in a request to add a feature that a thread get marked as read as soon as you click on it, thats the way most PHP Forums work. That way people know if they have viewed a thread or not. and not a whole forum.

Attached Link: Interposer info

Attached Link: D-Form Plug-in

well you don't need Shade, but in order to do joint editing for Poser format product you will need a version of poser, I don't know any way around that. I'm sure that studio will have a Rigging system with joint editing eventually but until than poser is necessary.

Nope PWSurface doesn't do toon shading, but if you dont already have them the freebie toon shaders in the DAZ freebie repositiory that were given away a few weeks ago are excellent giving far more control than the basic toon renderer.

Quote - "Yes, and projection painting is there in v2, IIRC - no need to get v2.5 just for that. (Though there are probably other good reasons to do so!)"

Yep, pretty sure it was in version 1 as well, from what I recall. actually 2.5 is not much of a jump from version 2, there are a few new features, such and normal map baking and things like that but not a lot that make it particularly better for poser map production.