Hi all,

I'm a very new user of Blender.
I've created a simple cloth simulation of a cloth
falling on a sphere. It takes about 3 minutes to
calculate. After its completion I can successfully
play through the simulation. But if I save the simulation file to disk
( which is about 19MB ) after opening this file I was expecting to
replay the simulated sequence, but it proceeds to recalculate
the simulation again. Being a beginner I'm probably doing something wrong, but is it possible to do this? or do I have to go through
the recalculations again?

Many thanks in advance
Dave159

Try rendering the animation but be sure to have the animation render set to a correct format (H264 or similar) and this will create a file such as an .AVI which you then can play on an external video player. Also check that the path for the file you will create is set to a location where you want the finished movie file to reside on your computer. Once this is done, your movie file is just like any other video file and you can play it whenever you want.

bill2reg, thankyou very much for responding,
but I'm mainly interested in anylising a series
of cloth simulations so I can select at what stage
and camera angle in the simulation to export the cloth as a mesh for a still render. May be its not possible to do in Blender, but ts strange that
the sequence of calculations seem to be saved to disk because the files are
so big. I wanted to create complex high polygon meshes of cloth where
the simulation might take many minutes and save the files
without having to go through the whole process of recalculation
again. The same thing might apply to an ocean sequence where i might
like to select at a future date the best ocean mesh for a still render that can
be used in any piece of software like Daz studio for example.

Dave159

OK if I understand you correctly, then you should bake the simulation first.Then select a still image format (.jpg, .png etc.) and then render animation. This will render each frame as a still image, but I suggest a separate folder to hold all the images!)

bill2reg!, thanks for replying but I'm not being very clear obviously.
I need to save the simulation and play through the simulation without
needing to do the calculations again, then select a good frame from the simulation and save this as a cloth_mesh.obj file for a single render to include in any other software like DAZ Studio.

It doesn't look very likely, but I just needed to know if this was possible in Blender.

Dave159

So what file formats does DAZ accept?

Wave front obj type is the one i use. But the problem is nothing to do with DAZ Studio, its replaying a saved simulated file any time i like in Blender, which may have taken 15 minutes to calculate. Any how thanks for trying to help.

Dave159

I would create a folder to hold the image sequence, because there will be a file created for each frame. Be sure to specify the new folder in the 'output' file name. Then. render the simulation in blender but select a still image output format (.png, .jpg etc.) and then click on 'animation' instead of 'image' under the render dropdown. This will give a sequence of still images that can be played by most players, but you can still select any frame from the still images. I thought that's what you wanted. I hope this works for you.

bill2reg! thanks, at least you are responding.

I can't put it any simpler than my previous posts. But i will have one last
go and then call it a day.

I simply want to play through a calculated cloth simulation from a saved file on disk without recalculating the simulation.
After the simulation has taken may be half an hour its possible to play through the animation, but as soon as i save the file and load the file it starts recalculating again, which may take a long time.
I'm not interested in creating a video file to play an animation.

Dave159

OK. The last suggestion I have is to "bake" the simulation to a disk cache. You will see check boxes for these options in the simulation properties panel.