Welding DMM

Everybody Weld!

As we have mentioned in the past, you want to keep glued regions to a minimum if you can and only use them where it is necessary. Using glue with impunity can slow down your simulations. We are working on a faster glue for a future update, but for now, you really don't want to go nuts with it.

An alternative to using glue is welding. This is done by merging the verts from two different tet cages together.

To do it, you have to take the following steps:

1) Create two tet cages (a polygon mesh that will form the basis for the DMM tetmesh). Use meshverify to ensure that your tet cage is appropriate for DMMization...
2) Merge the cages into a single mesh using the Maya polygon merge mesh feature
3) Manipulate the verts you want to weld so that they are colocated in the mesh.
4) Use the Maya poly menu merge to combine the two verts into a single vert.
5) Turn the cages into DMM by picking the DMM>DMM ASSET>Create Bare DMM Object>from triangulated polymesh (assuming that your cage is already triangulated)
6) Now you have a DMM object that has the ability to twist around at that vertex.
7) Add your surface mesh to this object and you should be good. BTW, the surface mesh can be two totally different meshes (though you do have to use the poly>mesh>combine command to make them a single mesh)

Here's an example where I created a welded DMM object with two morphologically separate surface meshes: