I'm looking through the poser 8 manual still (mainly because my comp overheats too easily and it isn't easy to actually get any hands-on experiences). It looks to me like the newer and more realistic clothing and hair and stuff I'm tending to see would be this dynamic stuff.

Is that right? Does it mean that older props are out of date now? Are there issues with using clothing that conforms more naturally? Am I even making sense?

Dynamic clothing makes up a very small percentage of the Poser/DAZ market. The big advantage of dynamic clothing is that you can use any morph/pose on your character and you don't have to worry about getting the clothing model to fit because dynamic cloth is calculated to drape over the figure...as if you took a piece of real fabric and just dropped it over an object. Dynamic clothing looks a lot more natural, but is an absolute pain in the ass to use...at least for me. If you set up a scene, then drape the dynamic clothing, and you don't like the way the character is posed and want to change it, then you have to go back and redo the dynamic clothing everytime you make a change. Not to mention that Poser and DAZ Studio handle dynamic cloth differently, so items for one can't be used in the other without some extra work.

Dynamic clothing looks more realistic, but it takes a whole lot of time and patience to deal with it. Conforming clothing still dominates the market, and that isn't likely to change anytime soon. You can go through the DAZ store and probably count on one hand the number of dynamic clothing items released in the last few months, versus the hundreds of conforming items.

Thanks for that useful reply. So it looks like dynamic clothing is more the future than the present. Pity really because the older sort of clothing so often ends up not quite hanging right, or conforming where it's supposed to hang loose.

Oh well, there's always nudity

I don't use dynamic clothing very much. I've seen very good results with it, but I guess I'm just intimidated by the thought.

When I'm looking for conforming clothing, I try to check the morph lists to see if they have the special features I'm looking for. If I see morphs like "skirt up", "panties down" or "bra open", then I know I'm on the right track. After all, most of my models won't be wearing the clothes for very long anyway.

Unfortunately, only a few of the vendors I've found do that consistently.

I have used Dynamic Clothing for DAZ (requires a paid-for product) and you need specific clothing products that support it - sort of limited just at the moment. That tends to mean you can find yourelf limited to what you can do. If you want to introduce wind effects (which the DC add-on handles for DC clothing items) then any non-DC clothing will not be affected, which may present difficulties. Likewise with some poses, where the drape effect of DC clothing will work with the pose, some other clothing will not follow suit.
That's not to say it is not worth it - the piccy I did of Candice in front of the mirror uses a DC clothing item.

What hojojitsu says about morphs is very relevant - and you may need to 'walk through' all the nodes in an item to see all the available morphs as they do not always show up with the overall item selected. Again, this is DAZ I am talking about, Poser may be different.

Just a note; The first version of Poser to use Dynamic Clothes was version 5. First version with conforming clothes was version 4. Just in case anybody is curious about this.