Match Particle to Poly Element Center

#1

Hello,

I’ve been scratching my head on this and am coming up short.

I have a mparticle softbody sim of bubbles working nicely on a piece of geometry of 100 bubbles merged. They are merged as I wanted the softbody to squish the bubbles etc.

Here is a screenshot of my setup:
imgur.com/1alpExm

I need to emit a particle at the center of each bubble in order to instance more geo. Is it possible to get the bubble geometry poly element position and lock a particle to it?

Or get on vertex per poly element and move the vector a distance based on particle scale to match the poly element center?

I reached out to a TD and they suggested I’d need to iterate break the faces into elements, iterate over each element and get the average position of the collection of faces. That would give me the center point of the element and push that value to the particle.

Being a Softimage refugee working in 3ds Max on this project, I’m not at the level in pflow that I was in ICE.

Thanks in advance, Using Max 2014.
Will.

#2

quick solution if you don’t want to mess with your original geo,

clone your object as a reference. On the reference put a relax modifier with a bunch of iterations… This will converge all your mesh points towards the element center.

Birth your particles from the cloned object.