My Small Cloth is Unstable

[cgiexpert]

I have to finish a short computer animated film by August, and I have not even started on the animation yet. Why? Because I've been too busy trying to figure out this damn CLOTH! I'm a pretty fast animator, so it is possible for me to complete my shots by August. However, I can not waste anymore time with this cloth. Could someone here PLEASE help me? PLEASE?

      The Scenario:

1) My character is kind of small, and she is made out of polys.
2) When I make my cloth object, I have to increase the base resolution to about 500 just to get some detail and change.
3) And when I do this, it takes a long time for the simulation to start.
4) And when the simulation finally does start, everything goes crazy. The cloth mesh explodes.

I have noticed that when I make my character HUGE (larger), the cloth works perfectly, and I do not have to increase the resolution too much to get nice detail, movement, and accuracy. However, my backgrounds are already large, and if I increase the size of my character, I would have to increase the size of my backgrounds to the point that they would start disappearing through the clipping plane. I

[gmask]

Read the docs for cloth as is very reactive to the scale at which it is created. This is explained in the included tutorial.

As for aniamting your character by august I see no reason why not. You have to animate first before doing any cloth simulations so don't get hung up on this and let it prevent you from animating.

PS.. Please do not post in ALL CAPS and give your title something meaningfull like "my cloth is exploding" etc.

[cgiexpert]

In reply to:"Read the docs for cloth as is very reactive to the scale at which it is created. This is explained in the included tutorial."

I have printed out and read the tutorial for cloth. I may have overlooked (not skipped over) the part about scaling, and so on. I will look through the tutorial again.

In reply to:"As for aniamting your character by august I see no reason why not. You have to animate first before doing any cloth simulations so don't get hung up on this and let it prevent you from animating."

Good point, but still ~ I will have to face this cloth monster sooner or later. I should tackle him now so I don

[gmask]

Look at your solver scale

[cgiexpert]

Yep. That did it! Thank you for your help.

For a test I made a cloth about the size of a stamp act as if it were a bedspread. I had to boost two things to make this happen:
1) The solver scale
2) The resolution factor

I'm still having a problem with simulating small shirts. It takes awhile for the simulation to start, and when it finally does - the cloth object goes wachy in some areas.

What confuses me most is what the ratio should be between the 'resolution factor' and the 'base resolution'. When I make small cloth objects, the 'base resolution' will not change unless the 'resolution factor' is increased.

Uggg... It feels like Cloth is still in BETA, or maybe I'm just not reading something right.

ALSO - I took your advice and I started animating last week. I'll work on the cloth as I go along.