I've bumped up against the limit of my skills, so I thought I'd come here for advice.

My latest animation project includes a sequence with a figure who is dusting or polishing a dresser. I've got the hand motions down pretty well, but I can't figure out how to get a realistic-looking dust rag into her hand.

At first, I tried clothifying one of the primitive squares. I parented the square to the figure's hand and tried running through a simulation colliding with the hand and the dresser. Poser crashes every time I try to run the simulation.

I also tried using the new bullet physics engine in Poser Pro 2014. The cloth square either fell apart, or didn't faithfully follow the hand motions in anything approaching close proximity. Maybe I've got the settings all wrong, but I gave up in frustration.

Has anyone done something similar? If so, can you offer some counsel?  Thank you!

I haven't experimented with bullet in that way yet. A -possible- solution with the cloth sim is to place a primitive partially in the dresser top. Place the d-cloth -over- the primitive, with collision set on the primitive and the dresser top. Once you have that, move the figure hand =over and around= the primitive, as if clutching it, then parent the primitive and -only- the primitive to the figure hand. Your crashing is almost certainly caused by collision errors a dense mesh with cuts in it can cause. By 'trapping' the cloth between the primitive and the hand, you can adjust the distance between them, giving the cloth room to bunch and gather around the low res primitive, and just using the the primitive to do the actual cloth moving, while the hand just covers up the trick you are using.

The only other option with a 'held rag' would be to model the part the hand holds as a solid mesh, then attach the dynamic part to that. The whole goal with dynamics is to keep the cloth from being pinched between two pieces of geometry; that will stall or crash the sim instantly.  

Iwould run a simulation with a new scene and drop the cloth onto a small sphere, use self-collision and collide with sph3ere ande ground.  start the cloth at an angle to the ground to promote some extra folding.

Export the cloth at a suitable frame , then import it to your scene. The bit draped over the sphere is to fit into the hand , set to grasp the cloth.  It will be a static prop but you wont hve any collision problems.

Here's another (untried) suggestion.

Leave the figure out of the way, and work on the duster first. Use the cloth square, and set a few vertices in the middle to the choreographed group. Move the unclothified square around in a dusting motion, then simulate.

That should give you the duster, probably after some experimentation and swearing. ;)

Then you can animate the figure's hand to follow the cloth. Set IK on that arm to help with that.