When connecting mesh sections to a Mesh Section switch, all tags defined in the in-going Mesh Section are seemingly NOT retained in the out-going Mesh Section.
This used to work in 5.5, where I had a set of character body meshes hooked up to a Mesh Section switch and tags on the different body mesh sections would be retained in the Mesh Section coming out of the switch node.
I tried working around this problem by hooking up the Mesh Section to AddToMesh nodes connected to Child Object nodes and use a Object Group node to switch mesh section instead of using my Enum and Mesh Section Switch node, but the result was exactly the same, the Mesh Section tags are not detected anymore.
Would be nice to know if something is being done to fix this as it makes Variation nodes, which rely on the Mutable tag system, virtually useless.
In the meantime I’ve switched from relying on tags to using an enum, which is a LOT less flexible.
To express the problem in clearer terms; when you connect mesh sections to any kind of switch, like an Enum switch OR through an Object Group, any tags that are supposed to be added by the chosen Mesh Section are removed (or at least not detectable by Variation nodes).
I have made some further discoveries on this issue, which I’ll detail here for anyone who happens across this thread.
It would seem that passing Mesh Sections with Tags does work as intended IF the tags are unique. If you have the same tag on more than one Mesh Section it will stop working. So perhaps there’s some conflict happening?
As an example, I have a CO with multiple character body meshes, let’s say 3 types of male bodies, normal, tall, and overweight, and 3 types of female bodies, same deal, normal, tall, and overweight. So a total of 6 Skeletal Meshes.
I also have several clothing options and I want to morph the clothing to fit the body type. I have the morph targets, Female and Overweight.
I want all 3 female bodies to trigger the Female morph target, so I add a shared tag on their Mesh Sections, “BodyFemale” and on both Overweight bodies, male and female, I will add the tag “BodyOverweight”.
This will NOT work. It used to work in 5.5, but not in 5.6. I would have to create 3 different tags for each female body (like “BodyFemaleNormal”, “BodyFemaleTall”, “BodyFemaleoverweight”), add all 3 tags to my Float Variation node and input the same float value to all 3 inputs, which is just not a good way to work.