twitchy reactor

Yes and yes... reactor is extremely weak for anything more than novelty grade solutions, attempt to do anything above that in terms of complexity and it loses integrity extremely quickly. The only time I've used reactor for production grade work has been the water simulation for driving the million dollars in the Blue Haven Pools million dollar ad (should be getting air time now).

Solution is either fix it or throw it...

fix it: Bump up the sub samples, go over your scene scale and mass properties with rulers and real world ballpark figures, change the euler rules and try to minimise all interframe chops (eg, mocap and bad curve types and spiking).

throw it: I don't know what version of clothfx ships with max8, we use a beta build from the guy that codes it, but I'd highly recommend using it. Real time previewing and the ability to manually pull it around just rocks. If you can spend the R&D time, you can pull off rigid and "collapsable" solutions (eg, metal solid metal pipes buckling under weight, skin and fat folds moving over skeleton etc). We've used it for quite a few projects like constantine and stalker, as well as a heap of tvc's so it's very production proven.

Is that you Joel? How's everything in Canberra?

I found I was getting twichy rigid body solutions. I also found out that the objects should be using TCB rotation controllers as reactor has difficulty with any other rotation controller type and gets that twitchy thing going on. Since changing to TCB I haven't had any problems with the rigid bodys.

Yup, 'tis I - everything's very peachy down here [:)] finding that living in Canberra and working internationally is a very nice combination!

Glad you got your fix, hope it's all good!