Skin Constraints in reverse way?

[josemendez]

Hello,

I am trying to use Skin Constraints for my creatures' "skin dynamics", not for "clothing dynamics."  I played around a couple of hours with it and found that it is rather for character's clothing than for skinning.
If we could set "backstop" and "backstop radius" outside of the skin, it would enable us to emulate some kind of animal skin:
Skin Radius - maximum distance of skin sinking
Backstop Distance & Backstop Radius - for prevention skin from infration

By having this feature in the system, we would be able to poke dead animals. I don't know if who would like doing it though.
If you guys add a single bool to existing Skin Constraints as a reversal switch, I think it is enough to implement this feature.

If this sounds reasonable, please think about adding this feature to the update.

If I miss something and you think it is doabl with already existed functions, let me know, please.

Hi!

I think you can do it just fine with current implementation. Remember that backstop is the distance from the skinned vertex to the backstop sphere along the vertex normal, and backstop radius is just its radius. So if you set the backstop to a negative value, the backstop sphere would end in front of the particle, as opposed to behind it. Not sure what you want to accomplish by doing this though (it's not like the particles are being pushed "out" of the body when you poke the skin, but "in", so you'd want the regular behaviour: stop them from sinking too much)

Also, it can be useful to set skin radius to zero and skin stiffness to something < 1. That would softly attach the particles to the skinned position.