When attaching a handaxe to an agent's hand, how can I make it drop the handaxe?

[crozer]

Hey,

I am attaching a shape to my agent's hand (via agentlayer). Is there a way to disconnect the shape from the hand and make it rbd (as to drop to the floor)?

Thank you!

[crozer]

Bump.. is this so hard?

[anthonymcgrath]

i wasn't able to solve it myself sadly i heard it was something about using the sop solver to turn off the constraint but again not really sure :/

[Atom]

As far I can determine from the help , this is not possible using Agent Layers at this time. Constraints do not seem to be involved with Agent Layers. You can put a switch on the Agent Layer node and switch to a NULL at a specific point in time. This will remove the layer, but for all agents.

 

What might be a better approach, if you know you want to create RBD sim from an attached object, is to look at the example file found here:

C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 16.0.632\houdini\help\files\joint_position.hip

This file demonstrates a Python and VEX way to locate bone end points for an agent. Then you can manually manage what gets attached to that bone point through common techniques rather than Agent Layers.

Edited June 8, 2017 by Atom

[crozer]

hey,

thank you for your answers. considering the complexity of doing something that i thought would be straightforward, i'm simply laying it off for now.

i would like to hijack this thread, though, and ask whether you know how to emit agents on impulse every, say, 24 frames? on the crowd simulation dop, i have set the crowdsource pop source to impulse activate if($F % 24, 0, 1). this works, partly, as the total number of points on the spreadsheet gets increased respectively. however, i see no new agents. i believe the new agents are being generated exactly on the present agents.. thus not being visible. why are they not being emitted at the origin, just as the first batch of agents was?

thank you so much!

chris