Thinkinetic Logo Mountain destruction

Pedro Ivan de Frias tell us some technical details about this impressive clip using Pulldownit in 3d max

MODELING

The Thinkinetic Logo was an easy task to do, just using splines to fit the shape; modeling the mountains instead took a lot of work, using a base 4×4 section and start adding polygons with soft selection to exhaustion, there are other methods using heightlevels with 2D tools images but I wonted and special shape in the central mountain to keep the Logo inside so no other way, when the overall shape was done, I refined everything using sculpting tools in MAX.

SHADERS

For environment mountains I applied procedural shaders, specifically an Arch&Design-Mental Ray material, in this way I got the rock and snow-like details, for the mapping I used Unwrap for achieving the final look.
The central mountain is mapped equally with an Arch&Design-Mental Ray material, but adding 4 composite levels to stress the rock and snow-like details, using Unwrap mapping. For fragments Inner faces I applied first the great PDI “cut material”, in this way I got all these faces differentiated from others after shattering, then I edit this material to include two different procedural shaders, to get the look of wet rock in the interior of the mountain, finally mapped using UvwMap Box.

SHATTERING:

I used the amazing Shatter it tool of PDi for this, first of all I checked “Assign cut material” to get a different shader on inner faces, I needed a dense resolution of fragments to generate nice cracks regarding camera view later, so I started breaking the mountain in just two areas, base and peaks, as I would need much more fragments later in the top area and a few in the base; then I created several splines following the surface of the mountain, and used the incredible PDi path-based shatter to create little fragments all along the paths, to generate nice cracks later in dynamics, finally I got near 5000 fragments on scene.

DYNAMICS:

I set substep 10, it is slower computing but you get more accurate dynamics, using PDI I created a fracture body for the whole mountain, and let parameters by default, I used the crackers objects created by PDI path-based shatter to generate the dynamics cracks on the suface of the mountain, It was not difficult to control the strength of crackers effect using path constraint parameters in MAX panel.
The Thinkinetic logo was too complicated to include it in dynamics, with the different letters and such, so I did a rude dummy with the same overall shape but rounded, and animate it to hit the fragments in the same way the real logo would do, I replaced the dummy for the real model when rendering .

RENDER:

Using Mentalray and LPM render manager, I splitted the scene in four passes, sky, environment mountains, central mountain and logo, each group keeping the lights information of the scene, and composing everything later in postpro.In postpro I added the lightning animating the gamma using different masks for Gamma to isolate some areas and affecting the main models.