I have a scene where tumbleweeds are colliding with a wall. Project link here:
https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/c7adfe9e-51a9-40e2-45db-a3858171eff2
The tumbleweed mesh appears to be too dense (or too thin) to work well with dynamics. If I use a soft body tag, it crashes the program. If I use a rigid body, the mesh doesn’t behave realistically. So to avoid this, I used a buckyball inside an Atom Array as a proxy in the scene. I set up the soft body and wind parameters to create the motion paths I need. I then baked the dynamics cache on each ball. Everything works perfectly.
My naive intention was to put a constraint tag on the tumbleweed and link it to the dynamic buckeyball. Of course, that didn’t work. Next I tried to create an alembic object from the buckeyballs and then bake the keyframes into a timeline. My expectation is if I could get real keyframes, I could track them with a constraint tab as originally planned. But try as I might, I’m not able to find a way to bake keyframes from an alembic object driven by dynamics. Maybe Athanasios covers that in his tutorial on what’s new in R20, but I wasn’t able to find that reference.
Am I wrong to think I should be able to generate a keyframe sequence from an alembic object or dynamics cache?