Bake soft body as geometry

Introduction to Maya - Rendering in Arnold

This course will look at the fundamentals of rendering in Arnold. We'll go through the different light types available, cameras, shaders, Arnold's render settings and finally how to split an image into render passes (AOV's), before we then reassemble it i

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# 1 07-11-2009 , 10:41 PM

EduSciVis-er
Join Date: Dec 2005

Location: Toronto

Posts: 3,374

Hey, got a dynamics for modelling question.
I wanted to use a soft body to quickly model a rock.
I created a sphere, made it a soft body, applied a turbulence to the resulting particles, and hit play...
Great! It gives me a nice jaggy looking rock after playing with the attenuation etc a bit.

Now, I'd like to bake that object so I can use it as regular geometry, but I'm a bit stuck with that. I tried edit > keys > bake simulation, and that gave me keys, but they didn't seem to work (scrubbing messed up the sim). Anyone have a series of steps that could work with this?

Thanks so much!

-stwert

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# 2 07-11-2009 , 11:10 PM

Subscriber
Join Date: Jul 2006

Location: London

Posts: 567

Could use a lattice to shape the rock instead?

Chris

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# 3 07-11-2009 , 11:15 PM

EduSciVis-er
Join Date: Dec 2005

Location: Toronto

Posts: 3,374

Thanks for the reply. I could try a lattice, but I'd still have to scuplt it myself, and probably wouldn't give me the jagginess I'm looking for.

-stwert

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# 4 12-11-2009 , 02:40 PM

Technical Director
Join Date: Feb 2004

Posts: 2,988

Export it as an obj file, as obj only contains geometry and uv information. This will bake the geometry to the current frame.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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# 5 12-11-2009 , 05:37 PM

EduSciVis-er
Join Date: Dec 2005

Location: Toronto

Posts: 3,374

Thanks for the idea NextDesign... I'll give that a try.
Another method I ended up trying and using was to select all faces of a sphere and extrude them out, then up the randomness in the inputs. The result is similar to a turbulence.