[Bf-committers] Cloth Modifier Results Baking

[zaz at visi.com]

Genscher and I are considering how we want to implement baking
the results from the cloth modifier we're working on.  We've looked
at softbody and fluid sim baking as examples.

In softbody, the baking is done to its own data structures and those
are stored and retrieved from the .blend.

Fluid sim saves the result to a directory and the name of this
directory is stored in the .blend.

We were considering baking the results of the cloth modifier to
shape keys.  There are some nice ease of use features provided
by baking to shape keys, like allowing the user to tweak the
results of the cloth modifier without having to run the entire
simulation again.  There may also be some programming efficiencies
here as I assume there's some support functions we could use
to more easily store our results.

Are there technical reasons we shouldn't use shapke keys ?  Are
there problems making potentially thousands of shape keys on one
object to store the results ?

TIA for any input you might have.

--
Todd Koeckeritz, zaz at visi.com

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