This was just a fast test of a wine glass breaking shot, after traying PDI plugin with some basic scenes sucessfully I wanted to test it in a more dificult one that other tools have failed to achieve with good results.
The shot is done in 3d MAX 2012, I created the wine glass lathing 360 degrees a spline line, after converting it to poly I added the glass shader.
Then I shattered the wine glass in 128 fragments using “radial style”, which gets a very convicing cracking pattern for a bullet impact. I selected the option “Hide original object ” to use the original solid model later in render.
Setting dynamics properties for the ground and the ball was very easy, I set both of them to “auto”, pdi auto detect the bullet is animated and “passive” was autocheck, I set also the ground as a passive object.
Then I created a fracture body with all fragments, setting hardness 40 and clusterize 20%, I made several tests until getting the more convicing result, this wasnt difficult as PDi computes very fast. I used “substep” 25 to compute dynamics , in this way I got better quality specially becouse the bullet was in very fast motion and needed more substeps.
Finally I made the render with V-ray, I have to render also the original wine glass before bullet impact and compose both shots later in postproduction, this is becouse otherwise the fragments are visible from the beginning.