OMG! What I just learned in this thread altered my very existence! There IS a way of getting some physics sims from Cheetah into other apps.
Frank’s method did not work for me using Rigid Bodies. Although I was able to key-frame the “Record priority” (whatever that is) after baking, those key-frames obviously also got deleted when I removed the physics tags.
However - another method incredibly DID work. So simple I never even thought of trying it all these years. After baking the simulation, just record your objects position and whatever other values you need as key frames. You can even save time by key-framing only select frames of the sim and having the animation interpolated (of course it will not have the same movement as the actual sim).
After key framing and deleting both the cache and the Rigid Body tags, the animation will still play and CAN be exported to all formats with different degrees of success:
FBX into Blender 2.8 - Prefect!
DAE into Blender 2.8 - retained animation but position and axes of objects all screwed up.
Glb into Blender 2.8 - no animation showing BUT bringing the file into one of the online gltf / glb viewers does show that the animation is retained and plays. So it just might be a matter of how Blender is currently interpreting the gltf specifications (Khrons group is still developing that Blender gltf importer exporter).
The online viewer I quickly used to test the glb file is here:
https://gltf.insimo.com/
Additionally, the Cheetah OBJ sequence exporter also works.
It might also be possible to use the MDD exporter script and the Blender MDD importer but I have not tried that yet.
I am so excited at this point - wish I had time to experiment some more but have a project due.
Would it be possible to create a script to record each object;s position, rotation, scale, etc.. Doing it manually is incredibly laborious.
I do not know if this will work for soft body sims, but it did work with a very simple ball falling and rolling of a plan Rigid Body sim.