Simply Maya User Community - Softbody + fields = unhappy

as the title states I have a bit of a problem with a project exploding on me. I'm probably going about this backwards but...welcome to trial and error.

I took a look at a tutorial about making an animated flag with softbodies and some dynamics. I mimiced the tutorial quite easily and decided to play with a few thoughts I had and found myself with an explosion lol. At least this time I didn't crash out to desktop. I tried to do this using cloth and could never get it to work, the cloth always acted rigid even when I set the material to silk...

Here's the idea:

I wanted to make an animation of a 'ribbon' moving left->right as well as upwards.After reaching the top of the arc it would be perpendicular to it's starting pose then drop down and spin 270 degrees on the z-axis so the flat face was forward (facing the viewer) and finally come to rest. All the while it's 'tail' would be flapping in the wind until it reached it's final destination where it would be come rigid.

Here's the problem:

The motion of the plane is easy enough to animate, a few keyframes and you're done. I started creating the softbody, adjusted some of the particles' mass, added the gravity, tested the scene and got a really neat looking 'rubber band' effect as it came to rest. So far so good.. Then I added springs....BOOM, the entire thing exploded when I hit play. So I deleted the springs, reset the scene, reset the springs tool and tried again, this time it just disappeared. ugh!

Any ideas why?

also I still need to include turbulance and wind/uniform fields, so this may get rather ugly later lol.

(for those who want to know what I've used for reference/tutorial here it is: Animated Flag tut)

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