I am trying to obtain the variable importance of a rf model in any way. This is the approach I have tried so far, but alternate suggestions are very welcome.
That is becouse the obtained from train() object is not a pure Random Forest model, but a list of different objects (containing the final model itself as well as cross-validation results etc). You may see them with ls(model2). So to use the final model just call varImp(model2$finalModel) .