I've been slightly out of the loop lately; I received P5 about a year ago, but only used it a couple of times since I had problems getting it to write animations, and I frikkin' HATE the dials. So I've been sticking with PP. however, it just occured to me that with dynamic cloth, it might be possible to do something PP is not good at, like what I currently need to do, realistically animate draping a piece of cloth over a body, then pulling it back off again. Will collision detection handle something like this? can gravity be a factor? I'm hoping this is a "newbie" question; I doubt it, but i'm hoping. P.S. did they ever fix that animation file writing bug? would crash to desktop as soon as the first frame finished rendering, no matter what codec/format was used. and does anyone know if they did a "easteregg" PP GUI in P5, like P4 has the poser 2 gui?

P5 will be great for draping something on someone. I'm sure it can be used also to pull off the drape again, but that is beyond my animation skills. Something with a contrained group and parenting, I'm sure, but... I've never encountered that "animation file writing group" you mentioned, i've amde multiple (smaller) animations with P5 with no problems. As far as I know there is no easter egg in Poser 5, neither gui or hair or anything else.. i'd love to be proven wrong on that one though. Why do you hate the dials? Oh and make sure to install SP4.01. Does wonders for P5's stability.

Yes the majority of bugs are fixed now, and when all's said and done is there ever any totally bug free software? Be sure to download the latest patch from www.curiouslabs.com

Poser 5 will handle your cloth movement perfectly. You will need to read the instructions. To point you in the right direction you will need to use the Cloth Room. The collision detection you are referring to is object to object and not cloth motion. Start by creating the animation. Imagine holding just one corner of the cloth and animate that ignoring what the rest of the material is doing initially. (It will be as stiff as a board because its not simulated yet.) Now go to the cloth room, fill in the details for a new simulation. Clothify the cloth and set it to collide against your figure (and the ground if required). Now in the cloth regions set the corner that you were pulling to be in the choreographed group. And finally calculate the simulation.

Give it a go. Let us know how you get on. Good luck :)

I quickly made this little animation (attached to this message) just so you could see a simple example of what you can do in the cloth room. This is just a simple sphere and hi-res square primitive, but you get the idea. ;-) Sorry for the poor quality, but they only allow attachements up to 200kb here. :-( Anyway, in this animation, the ball is actually static (not moving), and the camera is following the cloth as it's being pulled off it. Is this somewhere in the area of what you had in mind?

Message edited on: 05/31/2004 07:13

I prefer the poser 4 and propack dials too. They arent so easy to switch off as the poser 5 ones are.