I have a strip of cloth with cloth sim. I want to use it to drive a bone chain, which will then drive the actual, higher detail piece to be rendered. Setting up the bone chain is easy, but I need a way to have the original mesh with the sim drive it. I have seen methods that involve parenting an empty to every vertex, and then the bone to the empty. However, I have ~30 strips, each with ~30 verts, so that would require me to make and parent 900 empties, which is insane.
Is there a better way to do this, or some way to automate it?