How to create vacuum packaging? I am trying to figure out, how vacuum packed sausages can be done in blender. The one you can buy in every grocery.

The sausages are not the problem, but the plastic packaging outside, which is normally really tight to its content

My first thought was to do it with a cloth simulation, letting a sheet falling down on it so the contours get visible. That will not work, because ... yeah it just looks like what it is... a sheet falling down on a couple of sausages...

The second thought was to use the shrink wrap modifier but that also will not work. If place a square under and over the sausages, the modifier only stretches the sheet also over the little gaps between the sausages. That doesn't look like accurate.

Is there maybe a way to let the content be a force to the surrounding package?

Its a bit complicated. The package behaves not quite like a second skin. You can see the plastic making an arc from one sausage to another but sticks very close to the content ... 

Any other ideas?
On the left, a shrinkwrap modifier is used, and this is both shrinkwrap and cloth simulation on the right.


The left one


It is a UV sphere, rotated so that the poles are at the sausages extremities, scale to be close to the target and subdivided in order to fit the target more accurately. The idea is to create a surrounding shape so that it helps the modifier to project the vertices correctly.

Then a shrinkwrap with a little offset and set to 'nearest surface point'. 

As you can see below, the gap between the two sausages is composed of stretches faces.




The right one


It uses both shrinkwrap and cloth simulation.

The shrinkwrap is this time set to 'project' and uses a vertex group: here we want to shrink/project only the needed parts:



The shrinkwrap is only here in order to level up some part of the mesh as if not the flat film may cut the sausages. But you can also sculpt/shift it up manually to avoid the modifier.

The cloth simulation uses a pin group and sausages are collision object:



After animation we obtain this shape:



Though, the blend file here uses Cycles and not Blender Render (as I don't know it enough). But I think the question was mainly about the film's shape.