Export Obi Cloth Simulation / Baked Simulation to Blendshapes/3D Packages like Maya?

[gstudio]

Hi Obi Support team,

Wishing you a Happy New Year!

Our small team has recently purchased your Obi cloth plugin as we hope to implement the goal net animation of our soccer project.  Since the project is targeted on the mobile device, we have tested the baked simulation & it is running much more efficient on both high / low end mobile devices. 

However, we noticed the baked simulation couldn't work on the Samsung S3 & iOS with the Bitcode support.  We're uncertain whether this could be due to the hardware / software (e.g. Unity compatibility, Android & iOS C++) issues.

Hence, we are thinking whether the Obi Cloth simulation / baked simulation is possible to be converted to Blendshape animation that can be used in Unity or simply exported to 3D packages like Maya for editing & re-importing back to Unity later as this way can streamline the process to support more existing high / low platforms.

Looking forward to hearing from you

Thanks & Regards,
Peter

[josemendez]

Hi Peter! Sorry for the late reply.

Obi does not support any export formats out of the box (there's always the possibility of writing your own exporter, though) as its main purpose is to perform the simulation in realtime. If you wish to use blendshape animations edited in an external animation program, I think your best bet is to use the offline cloth simulators already provided by these (Maya's nCloth solver, or Blender's cloth) and export them. Creating the simulation with Obi, transferring it to blend shapes and somehow exporting them to Maya for editing and re-importing seems a quite convoluted workflow imho.

Also remember than a baked simulation is not interactive at all, so unless your goal net always performs the same animation regardless on where the ball hit it, baked simulations won't fit your use case.

cheers,

[gstudio]

Thank you Jose!

Not a problem, we are certainly thinking alternative ways to create baked Cloth simulation using 3D software packages,
though we found Obi simulation is looking so great in the Unity Editor with minimal effort.

Yes having the interactive cloth simulation for the soccer net would look more realistic, but we would hope to support 
mobile device that are earlier model which couldn't run smoothly on real-time simulation.  So instead we may just create a few baked simulation that is hitting the net on different spots.

Cheers
Peter