fusing geo using uv attribute (eg. separated head from neck)

Lets say you've separated the head geo from the body for rigging purposes or otherwise.
How do you glue it back together reliably, without resorting to many individual vertex pair selections and fusing each?
UV's! As long as your mesh has good non overlapping UV's (which existed before you chopped it), you can promote them from vertex to point (might as well give it a new name, and keep the originals for actual texture use) then specify this new attribute at the Match Attribute (see below). Turn off Snap Distance, as the UV data is what will snap vertices/points together (in this case I've called it fuse_uv). I've left everything else in the Fuse node as default.
This is super handy especially if your model's point count is not fixed (eg you're not sure where you're cutting the model yet)

RBD Hard Constraints/Glue Constraints & Sanity check

hard constraints will read Force, Angle, Torque and Distance
Glue constraints will read Strength and Impact

Sometimes you will glue things together and they will still seem to come apart (when attached to something animated for example). Try solving the RBD Packed Object on creation frame - this MIGHT fix it...

Check your Constraint Network's "Overwrite with SOP" field if constraints are not being deleted correctly. It should only be active (value of 1) for the first frame of the simulation. Then it should go back to 0. Otherwise, it will constantly read in the constraints from the SOP level (ie. replacing it with vanilla untouched constraints)

RBD, Constraints..Glue, fracturing. NAMES

Name attributes are the most important things when making constraints for RBDs.

Create a name attribute for your object/fractured pieces by laying down an Assemble node, without the Packed option enabled. Create your constraints with this geo (it will retain the Primitive Name Attribute, and pass it down to the Point level once you've used Connect Adjacent Pieces)

In another branch, use another Assemble node to follow up the previous Assemble node, this time with Packed enabled, but the others disabled. Now when you add your constraints to your DOP network, they'll be able to find the correct Pieces to attach to.

ALSO make sure your object names are all unique.
Names. Names. Names.

Another "quick" way to make rest lengths for your constraints is to do a Convert Line node just before the Primitive Wrangle (where you do s@constraint_name="thingy"). This is important for Hard Constraints.


A general rule for constraint types - Hard Constraints will provide overall flex between pieces.. Glue Constraints will keep the pieces all together.
Hard Constraints react to Force, Glue Constraints DO NOT.
Glue Constraints react to Strength and Impact. Hard Constraints DO NOT. *

*unless you tell them to in a SOP Solver - eg. if (@force>chf("breakThreshold")*@strength)
But this is you explicitly adding Strength into the mix... Could be any old attribute.