I think this thread was moved by mistake to the Modeling section, unless I accidentally posted there myself. This should be in the Scripts section or Python support, but either way definitely not Modeling.
An update: I found the script that was used in Sintel for this. (In Sintel production directory if you have the dvd it’s in pro->Scripts->modules->finals_config.py) Some of it, in an older version is also up on this mailing list: http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/durian-svn/2010-June/003875.html
It looks like they hard-coded 67 different presets for Sintel’s cloth sim alone, and there’s presets for each of the characters from the movie in the same file, along with hair settings and some other things. The script also sets up a preroll of a few frames for the cloth bakes as explained in this thread from the blog: http://www.sintel.org/production/wing-simulation-or-gaaaaaah/
It looks like the presets are then matched up with particular shots in the movie, also hard-coded into the script.
So this is not a workable solution for anyone.
Brecht got back to me and fixed the bug in current svn and also shared this code (or just expressions?) for allowing changing of the frame start and end:
ob = bpy.data.objects["SomeObject"]
cache = ob.modifiers["Cloth"].point_cache
cache.frame_start = ...
cache.frame_end = ...
I’m not at all familiar with python so I don’t actually know what to do with that. Would anyone like to help me out here?
Without being able to edit the settings to tweak things per shot it’s probably not going to be very useful so I’ll probably just append the cloth objects for this production, since getting the movie finished is my primary focus. However if I can reverse engineer some of this code I’d like to try to write something that would be more generic and user-friendly, and with enough interest could maybe be developed into a full-fledged add-on.
I think it could be setup to, instead of having to hard-code each of the settings changes, create an actual UI panel (or use the existing cloth settings panel if that’s possible) to input the values. And of course make it non-object specific so the script can work for anything.
Lack of linked cloth settings isn’t a showstopper really. But this would be nice to have for future productions as an add-on at least until library linking gets rewritten in Blender.
Is anyone else interested in this functionality?