Exclude pinned vertices from physics simulation I have some meshes that slightly overlap in a couple of places and I'm using Blender's soft body physics to separate the meshes in the places that they overlap. 

I use dynamic paint to weight the vertices from one mesh that overlap with the second mesh. These weights are then used for the soft body goal with default 1 so that only the vertices within or close to the other mesh will actually move. 

My problem is that the simulations are slow, because they still take into account all of the vertices even when most of them can't move. 

So, finally, my question. Is there any way to exclude certain vertices from the physics simulations, so that they will be completely ignored?
Unfortunately this is not possible as I showed here as well. However, this should be possible if you are willing to dig into Blender's source code and figure out how to ignore the calculations done on pinned vertices. If you are willing to do that, you need to look into the code in softbody.c and see where you can make the necessary changes and then recompile Blender to get the desired behavior.

As I explained here Blender's soft body physics solver will go under significant overhaul in the future and doing what you want looks to be definite possibility once the new system has been put in place. This will take a couple of months though.