How can I bake a dynamic curve simulation?

[kratskcinnay]

Hi everyone,

I'm a beginner to dynamics but for my latest project I have a character with a dynamic curve/rope attached to him. All worked out quite well and I got the results I was hoping for. But now I want to render the scene and therefore need to bake the simulation. The only problem is I don't really now how or what to bake.

The rope itself is an extruded surface, connected to a curve which I made dynamic through nHair.
So now I have an Extruded Surface, a hair system, follicile, nucleus and the original curve that was made dynamic. I tried baking each of these with Edit>Keys>Bake Simulation and although the keys were created I still always had to calculate the simulation.

So my questions are: What exactly do I have to bake in order for the simulation of the rope do be keyed? Or are there any Settings I have to change?

Thanks in Advance

kratskcinnay

[s_ehrenhaus]

What you want to do here is caching.

Select the dynamic curve and go to nDynamics > nCache > create new cache

Options should be pretty clear.

If you have a polygon rope you should get a step further and do a geometry cache for the rendering process. Its good practice to cache out rigs  so that the renderer takes in just cached models rather than scenes with complete rigs in them.

So in animation: geometry cache > create new cache.

Then you can load that cache into a scene with just your model. Thatway nothing breaks in rendering.