Chain Link actor question

[insertmesh]

Hey there,


just had a couple of minutes to download the latest build (16030) and look at the new demo scenes (its a bit like unboxing new toys....

Played around with the chainlink scene and was wondering how to get rid of the chain link gaps...(due to splitting the chain link into convex parts for the physx setup).
So naturally, first thing to come to mind was to clone, merge and weld these parts, skin the resulting mesh to the original chain links parts, add a turbosmooth on top and then add that skinned mesh to the tyActor node.
But now I can´t figure out how to separate that skinned mesh from the chain link parts.
I thought the "actor" would be the skinned mesh and the "rig" particles the chain link parts.
So in the flow the actor op would test true for rig particles and only send the chain link parts to the physx event.
But it seems the skinned mesh is also considered a rig particle and sent to the physx event, effectively messing everything up...

So...what am I not getting here about the "actor" and "rig" particles? Is it not that trivial after all and the only way to get "smooth" chain links would be to copy and collapse to poly a flow with smooth chain links and then tyParticleskin that to the original flow?

[tyFlow]

Actor particles are those to which the Actor Operator were assigned. They also have global control over the corresponding rig particles that were assigned to them, for things like animation clip playback and transform updates.

Rig particles are the particles which correspond to the objects you added to your tyActor helper object, as well as any bones that were detected through Skin modifiers in tyActor meshes.

If you add a skinned mesh to a tyActor, technically it will get an equivalent rig particle, but that rig particle doesn't actually have any functionality because the skin itself is internally generated by tyFlow after each step of the simulation and is not itself a particle. I guess for simplicity and clarity I should not have skinned tyActor meshes generate any particle at all...I can't remember if I kept them in for a reason or not but the best solution would probably be to remove them entirely.

So long story short, you can't separate out skinned actor meshes in your flow into events, because they aren't particles. The same goes for cloth in tyFlow. You can modify cloth particles with events and operators, but not the cloth mesh itself.

[insertmesh]

Ok, I think I got that mostly...

as well as any bones that were detected through Skin modifiers in tyActor meshes. 

Just to clarify...If I´m adding a skinned mesh, do I actually need to also add all the corresponding bones (as I´ve done before), or are they automatically added to the flow through the tyActor?

And in that chain lin example...the only way to get "smooth" chain links would be to snapshot the starting point as a mesh, weld the verts in that and than skin that to the flow, or is there another way to achieve that?

Just asking for a friend....

[tyFlow]

Any skinned meshes added to a tyActor will automatically have its bones detected and added as well....no need to add them manually.

If a skinned mesh were added to my chain link example, using the current convex chain parts as bones, the result would be smooth chain links in the flow...so no need for welding. I may modify the example file at some point to include that.

[insertmesh]

Cool.
Just trying to see it from all angles. Pun intended.