I’d like to have stuff like particles or objects appear attached to various bones. Kinda like how a character would hold a tool, but for any bone of my choosing.
is there any way to do this that doesn’t involve just setting the CFrame of said object on render step?
No. You will need to update the position of your emitters every frame irrespective of if you use part-based emitters and weld them to the character or attachment-based emitters, the latter of which track the parts and not the bone.
My team had a similar issue wrt raycast-based hitboxes for mesh deformed characters and we had to derive our coordinates from the bone itself to be able to cast accurately from fully mesh deformed characters. Similar situation would apply here: you need bone positions to update your emitter positions and that has to be done every frame.
