I'm making sewing patterns in blender, i.e. several pieces of flat fabric. Typically I create each piece as part of the same mesh object, and join them with edges so that the cloth simulator will sew them together on an avatar.
What I want is to have a linked copy of a sewing pattern, but this time with all pieces laying flat on a surface for rendering. I can't do this directly because laying the pieces out flat would change the mesh object around the avatar, so it wouldn't be positioned properly for draping.
The solution I'm looking for is to have each piece of fabric be a separate mesh object, and using separate sewing spring edge objects to cause each fabric object to sew together with the others like normal. But I don't see how to do it.