Nvidia FleX animated rigid body
I was testing a few ideas and it looks like you can animate a rigid body to create effects similar to super strong motors. Animating springs seems to work well when creating more traditional style motors. I’ve only been able to get it working with the core API but there should be a way to do the same thing in the ext API (probably by editing the flexAssetExt).
In this video I just created a rigid body using the bone locations as particles. Then on each frame the rest positions are updated to match the animation. One important note is that you need to get the transforms from flexGetRigidTransforms() to pass into flexSetRigids().
The main difference between this method and attaching to bones is that the character can interact with the simulation e.g could swim though water or have a monster truck crushing cars. It should also interact with cloth correctly.
I might try the following:
- Create a low res mesh with verts at the particle locations. Then animate the flex body to match the vert positions. It could also be more bouncy by reducing the rigid body stiffness setting. This would use less particles (only need outer surface) and interact well with water and cloth.
- Use a skinny animated skeleton and attach a soft body to it. Objects can be stitched together by having the particles overlap and by creating a spring with zero distance.
A bit off topic, but I only found out about the inbuilt windows 10 video capturing today (Windows Key + G). It’s much better than what I was using before (Microsoft Expression Encoder 4).