Bone chain following vertex loop

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I have a strip of cloth with cloth sim. I want to use it to drive a bone chain, which will then drive the actual, higher detail piece to be rendered. Setting up the bone chain is easy, but I need a way to have the original mesh with the sim drive it. I have seen methods that involve parenting an empty to every vertex, and then the bone to the empty. However, I have ~30 strips, each with ~30 verts, so that would require me to make and parent 900 empties, which is insane.

Is there a better way to do this, or some way to automate it?

2

have you tried using the shrinkwrap modifier?
placing the shrink wrap mod on the chains bones or empties connected to the bones…
using the cloth as the driver for the shrinkwrap mod…

Is the chain connected to a spline IK rig?
I would think that would make it easier to work with for this sort of thing…