Make fractured pieces still be connected?

[Skybar]

I have a hollow sphere which is pre-fractured and then dropped to a groundplane. It breaks and the pieces fly, all good.

However, I want the pieces to still be connected after the initial sphere has been broken. Almost as if the pieces were glued to a piece of cloth. I guess I could just create a cloth inside and then constrain each piece to it - but with more than a 100 pieces it soon gets really tedious.

I'm thinking maybe something like, take one point from this surface and get the points closest on the second surface, and constrain that. But I don't know how to accomplish that at all (I'm guessing it is possible somehow? Like a wetmap for constraints or something along those lines).

Or do you have any other ideas? Maybe constrain the edges of each piece to one another, but then again, I have no idea how to do that without going in manually.

[JuriBryan]

Use the Glue Adjacent tool under the rigid body shelf.

and watch this video:http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2350&Itemid=132

[Skybar]

Yeah, the glue adjacent won't do what I want. The pieces themselves are already glued (before they break), and if I glue them to the cloth the sphere just sticks to that point in space - with the cloth falling. I've watched the video as well, but it didn't give me anything related to this really. Or did I miss anything?

What I want to achieve is like this really:

The eggshell breaks, but the pieces are still connected and don't fly away. As if they were glued to an inner piece of cloth.

Edited May 1, 2013 by Skybar

[nFrame]

If you haven't seen it, check out the bridge collapse example hip. It uses the apply relationship dop to apply a point constraint throughout the pieces similar to how copy stamping works. It works fairly well with voronoi pieces, except it can be a clever expression to calculate each constraints location. Most seem to use the bounding box info, but sometimes that isn't all that useful for some of the pieces. Maybe someone more experienced than I has a solid solution for that, or can figure out a solution with the spring network constraint dop.

[Skybar]

If you haven't seen it, check out the bridge collapse example hip. It uses the apply relationship dop to apply a point constraint throughout the pieces similar to how copy stamping works. It works fairly well with voronoi pieces, except it can be a clever expression to calculate each constraints location. Most seem to use the bounding box info, but sometimes that isn't all that useful for some of the pieces. Maybe someone more experienced than I has a solid solution for that, or can figure out a solution with the spring network constraint dop.

That could actually be something, thank you! I noticed however that the bounding boxes for the pieces is at the center of the scene at all times, don't know if it is supposed to be like that or if I did anything wrong? It does seem like the way to go though, and maybe use something else than the bounding box to find the positions, I will explore it more!