Not just you - Poser ruins most of my cloths this way. That's why its so important to use a busy pattern with lots of thread detail - it obscures the problem. I believe the cloth simulator does not update the normals properly or something.

Satin? Forget it.

It's because those polys have become non planar after the sim. You run into this sort of thing all the time in cloth sims and one way to avoid it is to triangulate your mesh before you sim it.

At least that's how i would fix it in other apps, not sure if poser has such a feature cause i only use it occasionally.

I did triangulate a mesh once. I also made a super high-poly cloth plane all triangles. I still had the problem. However, I'm no modeller and may have done it wrong so that experience may not be worth much as evidence.

Anyway, they don't seem to balloon to the same degree as in P5, but they do balloon if I enable smooth render int he render settings and on the objects themselves.

So, I have nothing conclusive to say.  It seems the smoothing is working, but is it working properly?

I seem to remember reading something a long time ago about how poser prefers one poly layout vs another (I'm not a modeller, so it really went over my head).  I think it was something about four sided polys vs three sided or some such.  Anyway, could this have anything to do with the problem?

Hmm, that thought of mine is like having a blind man use a sniper rifle. lol.

I agree smoothing works ON MODELLED things.

It doesn't seem to work on objects that have been twisted by cloth simulation.

The effect you show in the first picture looks more like a type of
aliasing effect that happens at certain angles of lighting.

Something similar appears in the grass here, when Displacement
is turned on.  And I GUARANTEE that the SmoothPolys bug is OFF;
I take great pains to insure that all props and all settings force it
to stay away!

Why would you be against smoothing?   This is how you make characters have curved shoulders instead of pointy polygons.  When it works, it's a fabulous improvement in image quality.

Attached Link: http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2697618

Bugs aside, smooth polygons is a fine feature. You can use low poly figures and still get round heads and such, instead of things that look like a geodesic dome. Follow the link and look for my post with the word "smooth" in it. I show a render of low-poly James and he's round.

Almost all the high end renderers support it and everybody does very low poly modeling now. Makes everything faster and you can load lots more figures.

@pjz99 : I think (seem to remember reading) that your "inner elbow" picture jaggedness is actually caused by the fact that the mesh is smoothed for rendering BUT not for ray-traced or  depth-mapped shadows (i.e. you will see jagged shadows of the un-smoothed mesh). You might be able to make things a bit better using a much finer shadow map (for depth map shadows).

For the first image, it would be interesting to see the mesh faces on the drape to see what the light and dark pattern actually relates to - i.e. is it bulging of many smaller triangular faces or distortion/twisting of larger square faces? I'd be interested to know if you could export the drape into PoseRay and then smooth/subdivide and then re-import as an obj, if the problem would go away.

When I rendered a scene with V4, G2 Sydney and Tuyuko in POV-Ray, I found that (particularly for shoulders and breasts) the mesh is really quite coarse. I had to apply 2 levels of subdivision to get a really smooth mesh on Sydney and Tuyuko - so I can see why the smoothing algorithms might struggle. V4 had the smoothest mesh to begin with - sort of indicating that DAZ took some efforts to make a high quality smooth mesh - but even V4 was not perfect.

That top image, the polygon lines are 1 to 1 between the mesh and the rendered image.  It doesn't appear to have been smoothed at all.  And if smoothing is applied to the figure but not to shadows - why would I use the renderer at all then?  This is a good motivator to get me rendering in something else and stop scratching my head over inexplicable crap like this.

See I used high poly triangles. The render is with just one infinite light, no shadows, smoothing enabled. Looks exactly the same with smoothing disabled.

I opened a case with EF support, the initial response was not very encouraging but hopefully they will investigate it further (and fix it one would hope!)