Constrain a Skirt so it doesn't slip?

[erudynamix]

Ok, this is probably relatively simple but I've tried everything I Can for 3 days and am having little luck.

I have a character that I am making a skirt for, just to test the capabilities of Maya Cloth. The solver causes the skirt to tighten around the characters hips, then slip downward. I am trying to constrain the top rim of points of the skirt to a belt.

If I do a simple mesh constrain, the top points stay right where they are (not conforming to the shape of the body). If I turn on "Is Soft" the skirt still shifts down the hips, but stops after a bit. I tried the Stiffness and Damping settings everywhere from 1 to 300 with little change.

I tried other constraints such as transform (top points of cloth just stay solid). I even tried combining constraints ...

So the question is how do I get the top points of my cloth to constrain to a mesh that is not a perfect square? I need them to shape to the contours of the body, and not slip down. Thanks for any input.

Wing

[drblacksnake]

when isSoft checked Maya creates springs, that's why cloth offsets. in manual You could read that stiffness about 10,000 makes them "rigid like steel", but where's the catch of using 'isSoft' then?
actually Your case sounds weird, because as far as I've tried it always worked for me.

[erudynamix]

I see, springs ... so if you create your cloth guides in a box like pattern (because it has to be parallel with planes) and want it to conform to an organic shape that may taper downward, how do you get it to do so without slipping off?

This is assuming a simple mesh constraint isn't the answer. If it is, maybe something in my scene is fundamentally flawed cause that isn't working for me. I can post the scene if it helps?

Wing

[drblacksnake]

perhaps You forgot to relax cloth before using gravity. When relaxing cloth assumes shape of collision objec, so no squares. And this is from fundamentals.
I suggest You to do Jackie dress-up tutorial.

[erudynamix]

Relaxing the cloth and saving as initial state was the answer. I found that tutorial you mentioned, it's pretty comprehensive. I had previously gone through the whole Digital Tutors disk which skilpped what to do with the cloth once it's built. But I did it and it works, took a whole 5 minutes to do. So thanks for the tip