Right now there is no easy way to do metal bending AND tearing in one flow (at least not that I know of).
You can do the bending with the particle skinner/physx workflow, but the particle skinner doesn´t have tearing (yet).
So I was wondering...having no clue about the technology behind it whatsoever...would it be possible to simple add the bend angle deformation option from the physx bind op to the particle bind op/cloth bind op?
The bind solver has no inherent knowledge of particle orientations, only positions...so it can't be used for rigid/stiff simulations that require bindings to maintain some relative pose to each other.
I can't really think of a wear to simulate metal tearing at the moment...closest thing would be doing a 1 frame cloth sim that results in some tearing and then immediately use the cloth bind operator's deconvert option to convert the mesh into a rigid shape again, passing that back to PhysX....but it's not really an ideal or flexible solution. Maybe in the future it's something I'll look more into.
I see.. And other than for this problem, particle bind doesn't need to see orientation. Noted.
As for the workaround... Not sure if you answered before, but are there any plans to add tearing to your particle skinner?
And since I don't have it in front of me right now: Can the skinner pick only certain events to be skinned to?
In reality, as soon as metal breaks, the broken pieces stop bending, so as a workaround I could maybe try some solution, where I have separate skinners in the scene and hide/unhide them when the breaking occurs: one skinner for the whole physx flow until it breaks, after that some separate skinners for the broken parts that are still bound together and the separate broken parts I would just render directly as meshes from the flow.
