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

[josemendez]

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.

ObiBone is designed specifically for this, and it will give you a great deal more control: you can specify bending /stretching resistance for each axis separately (not with softbodies, as they're isotropic), you can use surface collisions for better spatial sampling with less particles, you can control how much animation/simulation you blend on a per-particle basis by using skin constraints, etc.

kind regards,