bodies parented to vertices?

[Rick]

Before I would do any testing I was just curious if anyone knows if we can parent a meshes vertices to bodies so that the vert would move with the body causing a distortion of the mesh?

[darrenc182]

I don't see how you could parent a mesh's vertices to a body. I think you would only be able to parent a mesh to a body. Now you could always define a mesh with the vertices that need to get parented to the body. I guess the only other option would be to do it manually. Instead of using ParentEntity and letting the engine do all of the work, you can get the body's matrix and apply it to the vertices every clock cycle or whenever it is needed. Those are my thoughts on the subject. Rick if you don't mind me asking what do you need to do this for?

[Rick]

Was just thinking this could produce some interesting effects. Not sure how efficient it would be, but might lead to some funky stuff. Like if a cube had enough verts in it, and you applied this to it and randomly applied forces to all the bodies but kept their movement to a certain range it could create some kind of blob looking thing. Then if you applied that to a plane it might create some interesting water effects.

[darrenc182]

What about using a shader to do the vertex processing. You could use a vertex displacement mapping shader as a reference.

[Rick]

You wouldn't get physics that way though would you?

[cocopino]

You can iterate through the surfaces/vertices to morph your model. But I think you'll need to come up with any physics interaction yourself.