Third time now I have set up a cloth sim with a single dress and I have gotten some really wierd behavior:

Skin of V4 keeps coming loose from her body; when this starts happening, even when the sim is stopped, the skin stretches around the scene in a really disconcerting way.  If I try to revert the scene to saved, Poser 7 crashes.  I've run many dozens of cloth sims, I know how to set them up, and there isn't anything visibly different about how it's done in P7.  Anyone have similar experience so far?

Bah now it's corrupted that scene, that's really annoying :(

Umm... maybe's its V4? Just wondering... since we have two variables in the equation: P7 and V4.

Trying to isolate the same problem myself. Just out of curiosity, did you apply the Magnetize Clothing settings to the clothing beforehand?

EDIT: To further describe what I have seen on occasion, V4 starts swirling around in a corkscrew fashion, sort of like she's being processed by a blender or being hit by a wind tunnel. Is that what you're seeing?

I haven't been able to get it to happen consistently, but my suspicion is that it is related to the Magnetize Clothing poses. Your input would help!

No I hadn't touched the clothing magnets at all.  What I'm seeing is the skin of the model appears to be sort of peeling off the mesh and stretched around the scene, sort of like in 3ds Max when I tried to rig V3 to Biped and missed some parts.  The thing is, it would move around when no animation was running, it just didn't make any sense.

I have a hunch that it may have been the particular clothes, they are freebies off this site and they auto-parent themselves to the body (which is annoying if you don't want that, and I don't, I need to go cut that out of the files).  I need to experiment more with just plain OBJ imports maybe, it's kind of inconsistent - the same clothing item will work once and freak out this way the next time.

I don't see how it could be the figure, she's not being clothified, she's just animating around the scene.  If it's a problem that only manifiests itself with V4, that still does not mean the problem does not lie with Poser.

I have a hunch that it may have been the particular clothes, they are freebies off this site and they auto-parent themselves to the body (which is annoying if you don't want that, and I don't, I need to go cut that out of the files). <<

OK that's good to know. In my case it is hybrid clothing that we are working on, part conforming, part dynamic. Of course, it's conformed to the body.

So now I'm wondering if you might be on to something. Maybe it's related to parenting or conforming something?

Let's keep each other posted.

Hi. While waiting for the mac-version of Poser7 Ive found this in the e-frontier knowledge base. Eventually it could help. "Cancelling and restarting a cloth simulation can in some cases cause figures or props to show distorted geometry, and attempting to open a new file immediately after this occurs can cause problems. However, saving a copy of the file usually allows the simulation to be properly calculated and the effect disappears. Should a cloth simulation produce radically distorted geometry, don't panic! Save a copy of the file (just in case), then try deleting the simulation, recreating it and recalculating in the current file. That should give good results."

Thanks for that ... this has been an intermittent problem, so that might help too!

Also--have you tried recreating this in Poser 6 to see if its V4 causing it?  That's one way to examine the parts before assigning blame.  If V4 works in one and not the other, it's P7 gone buggy.

I don't see the issue in P6 in my case. Seems to be P7-related. Whether or not it's a combination of P7 and V4 I'm still trying to work out. 8-) But all these clues are helping!

Thank you Urig, that is what was common in the cases where it blew out.  I ran several cloth sims with V4 in Poser 6 and I didn't see this problem, but that is a small sample so it may just have not cropped up.  Urig's answer sounds exactly like what I'm seeing, I bet that is it.  Be advised this bug can corrupt a scene to the point where it will not load, although that might be solved by deleting *.dyn (the dynamic data files that describe where the cloth lies for each frame).