Simulation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 285

Linking Issues with Simulators
As mentioned before, fl uids, cloth, particles, and soft bodies all use a caching system to store their solutions.
The cache is a folder full of fi les, created in the same directory as the BLEND fi le you are using and named
“blendcache_” plus the name of your original fi le.
The major drawback to using these simulators right now is that there is no elegant solution relating to assets
and linking. For example, an object with soft body hair that is linked into another BLEND fi le retains its link
to its original cache fi les. So any simulation work that is done in the original asset fi le will play just fi ne on
the linked copy. However, you have most likely brought this element into your shot so that you can animate
it. As soon as you create a proxy for the character's animation controls and start to move things around locally,
the simulation can go crazy.
Creating a local proxy of the character mesh does not work to fi x the problem because many of the object's
attributes, like simulation settings themselves, are stripped away in the proxy-making process. The only way
to create a local simulation, then, is to make the character object local. There are several ways to do this, but
the most direct is to click the Li icon to the right of the object's name in the Object buttons as shown in
Figure 14.86. Other portions of the object's data remain linked to the original assets, but the simulation set-
tings are now free for alteration. You can adjust simulation settings and rebake, creating a cache for the local
shot fi le.
Figure 14.86 Making your object local
In doing this, you lose the linked magic of automatic updates for this object. The mesh itself remains linked
to the original asset, but many other object properties, such as vertex groups, are held at the object level, so
updates to them in the master fi le will not propagate to the object in this shot. What this means is that simu-
lations of this kind should be done as a last step before fi nal rendering. Hopefully by this point, your charac-
ters are set in stone and will not need alterations.