I'm having trouble figuring out a way to prevent particles from going through the softbody they are attached to. Once I add collision between the drape and the particle, the mesh deforms very oddly. Is there another way?

Also, I can't figure out a way to constrain the borders or corners, etc. I can constrain by using goal weights but I can't change the painted goal weights during an animation (ie, nothing to set keys on). For example, lets say I want the top left and right corners constrained at the beginning of an animation. Then at frame 100, I want the top left corner to release so the drape can start to fall. Then lets say at frame 200 I want the top right corner to release. Is there a way to do this with soft bodies?

YouTube - Soft Body Collision Issue

for releasing the "cloth" couldn't you use a spring constraint on the left and right corner? then you just set keys for the springs stiffness. let left one go to 0 at 100 and right one at frame 200.

edit: or you could directly set a key on "constraint" - a boolean that sets the constraint active or not. you have to go to channel box though to be able to set a key

and of course it would be a lot easier with ncloth since you won't need to create clusters, but can constraint directly to the cloth's verts.

Thanks BabyDuck, I'll try that out.

There is no proper way to totally avoid self collision issues. Springs help out alot but since soft bodies are particle based they do not actively consider other particles in the system (the way to think of particles are stupid, they have no idea what other particles are doing).