Create mesh out of cloth / softbody?

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Hi all,

is there any way to create a mesh from a softbody and/or cloth simulation?
I have a simple plane as cloth falling onto a cube.
The resulting deformed plane I want to convert into a mesh for further modeling.
How can I create a mesh from the plane from a certain frame?

Thanks!

#2

RE: 2.49b or earlier:

There’s a couple of ways, depending on whether or not you want to preserve the current cloth sim and all its frames.

  1. Apply the Cloth modifier at whatever frame you want – this loses the other frames of cloth sim but is very straightforward and uncomplicated
  2. Export the Cloth sim to a .mdd file (Vertex keyframe animation), then Import the .mdd data as shape keys (Load MDD to mesh RVKs) to a duplicate of your Cloth sim mesh, after removing the Cloth sim modifier. This makes shape keys of chosen frames from the cloth sim, which you can isolate to your chosen frame by a number of methods. The export/import process has a number of considerations concerning other modifiers, so it’s more complicated, but also more flexible in many ways.

Since soft-body is not a modifier on the stack, you may have to use method 2 for that kind of sim, though I haven’t tried it yet myself.

#3

Hum,
soft-body is plugged to the modifier stack since 2.3dunno
and ‘Apply’ works with 2.49x for sure
and I did answer the same question
for the same user there->
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=189411

proof for 2.49x has ‘apply’ working with SB on stack

SB_Fact.png848×802 55.3 KB

It is just that i don’t like ‘belly information’ to become ‘truth’.

#4

OK, sorry about that. I checked a file I was working on but the soft body as applied to a particle hair system wasn’t on the modifier stack, and I made a wrong assumption based on that. Good that it can be applied like Cloth, much easier to deal with than the export option, though maybe not as flexible for some uses.