What's the constraint between skeletal particles and bones? And can I disable it?

[kodra]

No constraints are used, since there’s no physics involved. Bone particles are simply fixed (their inverse mass set to zero) and then their position is updated every frame to match the corresponding bone. Kinda like what static attachments do, but without the hassle of setting up the attachments yourself.

Other particles around them follow the bone particles because they’re linked via shape matching constraints.


There’s no way to disable this, but there’s no technical limitation that prevents it either. It’s just that sampling the bone hierarchy with particles and then have the particles ignore the bones didn’t seem to have any use that would justify a “disable” option: you just don’t provide a skeleton when creating the blueprint.

Could you describe your use case for this?

Well, my use case is that the mesh is a curvy tube, like a tentacle. When I sample volume particles from it, it's quite hard to get an result where the particles are distributed nicely and evenly without a very high resolution. The bones already exist in the center of the tentacle, so sampling the bones get better result (I think) than sampling the volume. But I want them to act like normal particles, not fixed by the bone hierarchy.