What I’m trying to achieve:
I’m trying to animate beads being pumped into veins, which move through the winding pipe-like geometry until they hit a dead-end and stack/build up.
The issue so far:
I have been trying to do it with MassFX & I can’t seem to figure out how to control the flow properly while also allowing the beads to collide with each other.
Path flow seems to deliver the level of control I need, but it appears to only be for particles which is a problem, because I need rigid-bodies for 2 reasons; #1 they need to collide with each other #2 they need to bake into an animation Unity can use.
Rigid bodies with gravity force is too much effort for unsatisfactory results. I had to use like 10 of them to move the beads through a 90 degree turn, only for the sphere rigid-bodies to crash into the sides of the pipe, instead of the overwhelming force pulling them towards the centre of the pipes. This happened even if I used spherical gravity.
I need to be able to bake the results (positions of each bead) to bones or nodes that Unity can use to replicate the animation in real-time.