Blender: 100 soft bodies?

Hello everyone!
I have two questions about Blender’s soft bodies. Maybe somebody knows how to do this?

  1. In Blender, is there a way to simulate many soft bodies at once? Alternatively, is there a way to simulate many cloth objects at once? I would like to animate about 100 objects that are rather rigid, but jiggle a little bit.
  2. Is there a way to import Blender soft body simulation to Unity?

Many thanks for any ideas,
Greetings,
Shu

I’m sure you can get Blender to simulate that just fine. The bottleneck will be performance of said simulation, as I’m sure it is far from run-time capable, especially since it is meant for offline rendering. I don’t use it much, so I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head, but I know you can use options in the physics tab to turn those settings on, bake, etc…

There won’t be any direct import into Unity for this. You best option might be to find a way to run the simulation in Unity run-time. I know Unity has a basic cloth simulation, and you might be able to find something for soft bodies on the asset store. Also,you might be able to work around it by doing it via direct animation with bones, especially if the objects just jiggle a bit. The last option is going to take vertex skinning of some sort. Either one, in Blender, you bake the animations to blend keys and import that into Unity, or two, you export a series of models and find a store asset to animate directly skinning verts between the models. This could be the best way for looks, but it will be harder to do.

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Thanks a lot for your answer! I figured out how to bake 100 Soft Bodies in Blender.
I was doing it wrong. I tried to bake it as a “Disk Cache”, but this will only bake the active object.
When not specifying, Blender will bake the entire scene.

I tried importing Blender shape keys to Unity at some point, but I wasn’t able to do so and documentation online is pretty sparse. If anybody knows how to import Blender shape keys, can you give me a hint?
Also, maybe I should add that I use .blend files.

This is a very good idea kburkhart84.
Because, I was now about to say,
For eg. If you made a character (Kasumi from DOA) in Blender with softbodies on it.
And you made an idle animation.
Try to Save the animation of the character and try and import it into Unity.

I really hope it works.
If it does, please post your findings. :smile:

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When it comes to characters, though, wouldn’t you rather use bones? You are probably talking about breast animation, right? Because from what I have read, animations like that are typically being rigged.

Actually, I was more talking about the character animation, than the breast animation.
But yeah, if you are speaking about breast physics, It is better to rig them.
If done correctly, putting a generous amount of vertices/polys and bones, in the right places, will result in some good, say bouncy movements and good muscle bouncy movements too.
The only limiting factor here, is if the game engine being used, can handle the number of bones used for the character.
Sorry if I went a bit off topic here. Ha! Ha!

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I see, but I don’t really know how you would use soft bodies in character animation. Would you really try to animate muscles’ bounciness with soft bodies? I have never gone so far to actually animate muscles separately.