The ability to ‘bake’ game engine physics into IPO curves is fantastic -
Is there a similar way of converting the mesh changes from a soft-body animation into Relative Vertex Keys so you can actualy get at the vertex coordinates and use them as parents for other objects for example.
I know the soft body BAKE facility writes the mesh coordinates for each sampled frame somewhere, and the vertex count doesnt change during a soft body animation, so it should be possible to do this.
Any ideas ?? Have I missed something everyone else knows about ?.
Not for me … The softbody objects seem to forget about all there parent/child relationships, modifiersand constraints when the animation starts.
What I’m trying to do is model a chain dropping to the ground. The chain is too high vertex to do a full softbody animation, so the idea is to softbody animate a line of vertices, use these as hooks onto control points in a curve, to make the curve reenact the baked softbody motions, and use the curve to deform the fully modelled chain mesh.
It turns out that curves can do soft-body animation as well as meshes, and the Curve Deform modifier is aware of the instantaneous state of a controlling curve, so the mesh being modified by the curve gets modfied by the soft-body animated curve.