Hi All,
I added a new feature to RE:ticular. Particles to Empties. If you leave the Particle Name field blank in the RE:ticular rollout panel the AddOn will generate Empties instead of object based particles.
What good are empties?
Consider the next step in this convoluted setup. I import a character and link the control Pose Bones to actual mesh block shapes. I link them via the Copy Location and Copy Rotation constraints. In this example I have 3 mesh block shapes linked to the rig. Now I create a plane and merge two of the vertices so the plane only has 3 vertices. I add a particle system to the plane and turn off gravity and all velocity normal. All 3 particles are born on frame #1 and live for the life of the animation, emitted from the vertex locations. These 3 vertices form a triangle mesh and are located near the controls bones they are bound to.
With the new Particles To Empties feature active when I play the animation I get an Empty generated and updated at every particle location. Now we have real particle objects that we can link our mesh blocks to. I link the mesh blocks to each of the three particles via Copy Location constraints. As long as the particle count remains the same, the system should remain stable.
When you play the animation at this point, the foot and waist controllers jump to the location of the particles. Add a wind force and the character starts to blow away in the direction of the wind. All done within Blender Internal, no Game Physics are involved.
