After days of trying I finally got a reliable soft-cloth sim on a character walking in a dress.  In order to make the sim work I was forced to use the Physics tab, with Soft vs Rigid and Self-Collision tweaked.  I was also forced to use the Project Settings Soft vs Soft setting (because I had a jacket, and skirt combination and needed to simulate them bumping into each other).  Fine -- all part of the learning curve.  I baked the Soft Cloth Sim on the time-line, all good.

Then I added hair and parented it to the character.  After days of ripping my own hair out I finally figured out a simple combination of Soft Cloth Physics, and Softcloth Project Settings that made the hair do what I wanted.  I Baked that to the Hair time-line.

Both Hair and Clothing work as planned (for training purposes).  But MY QUESTION is this:

The PROJECT SETTINGS tab for Softcloth is now different for HAIR (parented to character) and CLOTHING (character).  i.e. They are two separate sims.  How do I revert to the Clothing settings in Project Settings after changing them for Hair?  How do I re sim my clothing if I need to, and will that alter the hair sim?  Is there and on/off switch for what gets baked, and how does it work?

I bring this up, because if I have four characters, and they each have clothing and hair, will that be eight soft-cloth sims I'll have to run?  I'd hate to get to sim eight, and find out I'd over-written the first seven by mistake.  Has anyone dealt with something like this?  Sorry if I'm missing something obvious here.  I guess I'm asking, what is the methodology for running multiple soft-cloth sims on multiple objects in a single project?

Any help appreciated!

--Bex.

There is not more than one physics engine running. You can turn on rigid and soft physics for the world, but it is just one engine running. 

Think of the settings in the preferences as "the world", and the settings in the modify/physics panel of each object as the attributes specific to that object. For instance: a car and a jacket are both effected by the worlds gravity, but one can be much lighter, and softer than the other.

So each object that you assign to have physics will hold it's own settings, they not effect the world settings. So if you want to change the world settings for each object, you're stuck doing it manually.

So set your world settings to have the collision settings you need, including soft-cloth baking. Then, disable physics on a per-object basis if you want to leave them baked. Otherwise they simulate anew each time.

Thanks Rampa!  Just to make sure I understand:

1 - I activate PhysX Activate Physics (in the Modify Menu), and the Soft Cloth Bake animation (in the the Project Menu), and get the simulation right for object/figure 1.  When that is done I deactivate the PhysX Activate Physics for that object/figure. 

2 - Then I choose my next object/figure 2, and do the same thing. 

3 - ... and so on for any additional objects/figures.

This will allow me to make multiple sims, and save the results (baked) for each figure/object.

--Bex.

Yeah. And once they are baked, you can turn off physics completely if you want to.

Thank you!  As always, very very helpful!

--Bex