Just wondering what the high point are for rendering animated cloth. I have managed to clothify a couple of bits of dynamic clothing, and now I am wanting to try and get V4 to simply walk a path and have the cloth do its natural thing.

Question is this, do you clothy and run the simulation before the walk designer or walk designer and then clothify, or doesnt it make any difference?

I have tried creating the path and have used the 15 frame lead in from pose to first step, I have also used 15 frames for the intial cloth drape, will these two complement each other or hinder each other?

Is there a formal or right way to sequence the tasks, obviously textures etc can be left to the end to avoid slowdowns but just not sure about how to include the dynamic cloth calculations in an animation, I am thinking that the animation should be done first, then the obj props imported and run through the cloth room, but when doing that I seemed to have a bug where I couldnt resize the imported obj, nor move the main camera (this was after running the walk designer).

Just wondering what sequenc/pipeline the pros are using...

Thanks in advance.

I use a 40-60 frame cloth simulation and then add the walk animation to it.

the final frame of the cloth simulation is the start frame of the animation. 

Use the start and end frame counters to control what is rendered to the final animation file .

well you can't really run the simulation before you have the keys from the walk designer right?  you can clothify the object, but it needs the movement provided by the walk designer to find the verts to collide with.
if you have a problem with other things after using the walk designer, i would recommend getting the walk you want and saving the file, then closing poser and opening the file.  that should clear the error there.  then go ahead and apply cloth dynamics.
note that the premium method for using dynamic cloth is to grow the cloth to fit your figure first, and then save out the object at the point at which it fits, then reimport the obj and save to the library.  i have occasionally had problems with poser having an issue looking for the obj when it wasn't saved to the library.
if you want the cloth to be tight, you can use a magnet to very slightly shrink the parts of the figure the cloth will be tight at and save this.  grow the cloth to fit this.  then start all your animations with 1 frame that is this shrunken part, the rest normal.  this will preserve some of the tension you need to hold the cloth in place.

go that way really fast.
if something gets in your way
turn

Thanks for the input, I will have to do a little more experimenting.

I wonder if you could expand on "growing the cloth"? So far the obj files have all previously been conforming clothes that I have exported as obj and then re-imported. This has resulted in imported obj props that have needed to be resized and repositoned to V4, and then clothified.

If I understand what you are proposing is to set the start pose for the animation and conform the clothing and then export? rather than the traditional exporting at the zero pose?

thanks again for the replies.