Is it possible to bake out just a few hundred frames of simulation, and then have those baked frames play out/loop indefinitely through a timeline - rather than having to bake out thousands of frames?
It takes a lot of tweaking in the timeline to get a decent loop…first off you need to start the sim in the negative frames so that is in progress by your first frame…That setting is in the user preferences, under animation tab…
Then what I do is to take the sim and I may need to have the start frame in the animation range somewhere say 10-20 frames in…scrub through the animation till I find an area that resembles the first frame…and mark that as my last frame…then with a copy of the first few frames pasted on the end reversed…you can add a subtract ( using the begin and end frames) till it looks good…it takes a lot of trial and error…
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Thanks, but that’s kind of a step ahead of where I am - I just want to know how I make a baked simulation loop in the first place.
I figure it has something to do with the Cache File mode in the Dope Sheet, but nothing seems to show up on it for me - and there’s no explanation on how to use it in the Blender manual.
OK…so you just want to bake a picked number of frames and play them …??
to pick a selected section of frames and render out or add to cache (either memory or Disk)
there are 2 locations to set ( actually 3 if you include the timeline)
I. In the Output tab, you can set your start and end frames. I showed starting at frame 25 end at 60, out of a 100 frame simulation.
2. Under the particle settings, in the cache, you need to save file first then it will open options. If the cache is in memory it is not required but you should save anyway!!
3. Once you have selected the start and end frames…the cache will bake only using the range you picked.
I was thinking you wanted to loop frames so that it plays smoothly with-out restarting the simulation when it jumps back to frame one. Since simulations are all linear…
This video explains it pretty well