John Bashyam and friends made this stunning shot combining Pulldownit plugin in Maya and After Effects, he kindly share some details about production below.

I thought it would be fun to create a video of a meteor hitting the clock
tower at my school. So I went out and took some reference photos, and then
began to model the tower in Maya. Once I was finished, I added some basic
textures and then went out to shoot the actual video. After this, I
positioned the virtual camera in the same place as the camera in real life
in order to get the perspective right.

Now came time for the destruction. I was thinking about using the Rayfire
tool for 3ds MAX, but I figured it would be such a hassle to import my
geometry, run it through Rayfire, bake it, and export it back out to Maya.
That is when I came upon PullDownIt, which would do all of this inside of
Maya. I decided to give it a try, and it worked like a charm.

I selected all of the geometry to be destroyed, and fractured them using
the PDI basic fractures tool (I even further fractured a few pieces so that
I would have some tiny shards). I put a ball in the scene which I was going
to replace with a meteor later through compositing and then ran the
simulation, baked it, and rendered out a .png image sequence.

Next, I went into After Effects, imported my image sequence, put it on top
of my original footage, added some more debris, smoke, the meteor, lens
flare, color correction, and all of that good stuff. Note that it only
switches over to the CG tower upon meteor impact.

Since I enjoy using Maya over any other 3d program, it is so great to have
a destruction tool that opens right inside. PullDownIt does a nice job, but
it would be cool to have some dynamic destruction features (fracture on
impact).

I am currently studying Animation at Loyola Marymount University in Los
Angeles, CA.

www.savageanimation.com

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.

Ivan  has been involved  in the Spanish animated film “Tadeo Jones” recently as Ligthning TD.

http://www.pytonproducciones.com/

Boris Bruchhaus did this impressive clip with Pulldownit in Maya, he kindly shares some details with us.

I did this as a personal project to test out Pulldownit for future work. Firstly, I modeled the tower based on and matching the plate I shot myself a while ago (I used to work in that building). I then fractured the model into about 4000 pieces, grouped together in sections.

The rbd-simulation itself was split up into layers (top windows/first explosion, main building etc.).After several versions the sim was finally cached.

I combined all the animated pieces together with history on (keeps the animation curves), so that I just had one big poly shape to use as an emitter for particles. Based on their velocities the particles are emitting into a fluid-container (resolution 400x100x100) to create the main dust/smoke. Additionally I also emitted particles from the debris to use as instanced small-debris (about 45.000 pieces).

After a while the scene, looked through the shotcam, got a
bit messy, so I just added another cam to capture the simulation from a more total-perspective.

I rendered the smoke (with holdout from the debris), the debris and the instanced particles independently and comped everything back together in Nuke (very rough)

Pulldownit is already a great destruction tool. I miss the ability to add more complex edges, believe me Pdi is “solid rock” stable computing, I think  adding some more scripting/event-based possibilities would be very useful in production.

Boris  currently works at MPC in London as a FX Lead TD

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3990680/

Hey, no worries,  it isnt real at all, actually Luis Tejeda did this impressive scene with Pulldownit in 3D Max, in this article, he kindly share some details with us.

After the success with the winegalss breaking test, I decided to try something bigger with Pulldownit to test the real power of this amazing plugin.

I wanted to portray a scene of destruction as credible as possible by using a real world model. I decided to recreate Saint Pancras Station in London. It is an emblematic train station, which connects the European continent with the British Islands through a huge tunnel. I liked it and I thought it was a great candidate for my clip. Sadly I relied on just one machine to do this work, so I tried to keep the project as simple as possible by removing local lighting and some geometric details. Nonetheless, the model of the station isn’t low-poly at all, hopefully resembling the intricate look of the real station.

I used an Intel i7 quad, 8 Gb ram machine, with an Nvidia Quadro FX3800 card. I must say with Pulldownit I did all the destruction work in less than 10 minutes. It was very easy to use. I’m practically a beginner with Pdi but everything went very smoothly.

You can see several metal beams in the ceiling being destroyed, also some glass panels explode and finally a long crack is created all along the platform. I used Shatter it tool to pre-fracture all these, except the beams. This is because I wanted them to break as single crossbars rather than in clusters, so I simply created fracture models for the beams’ geometry. I think the end result looks more real by breaking them this way.

The ceiling of Saint Pancras is a kind of industrial glass so I used a radial shatter style to get the best glass breaking effect when the meteor hits. In reality, the meteor I used for this shot was much bigger than the one shown. This way I was able to get bigger potency thus making the effect much more impressive. I simply hid it from the screen and displayed the smaller one instead. In the end it looks like the small meteor generates the shock waves, which give way to the rest of the wreckage. In addition, the ceiling is resting on hidden walls to keep it steady until first impact.

For the three exploding glass panels I used uniform shattering. They break upon impact with the meteor; it was a straightforward task in dynamics. The platform floor next to the panels also has uniform shatter, but since I wanted some fragments to remain intact, I used Pdi advanced fractures to set which fragments should break and which not.

To create the dynamic crack on the floor I used path-based shatter. This is a great feature of Pdi. It consists of a small sphere that moves along the fragments, cracking them like a little earthquake, very impressive. As a final touch I added a forgotten suitcase that interacts with the cracks and then falls into the gap when it topples over. I think it gives the scene a bit more drama and it was very easy to do.

Dust was added in postpro using a plugin for After Effects called “Trapcode Particular”. I wanted all the destruction effects to be clearly visible so I added only a soft dust layer. Trapcode worked great for this, it allowed me to make the dust follow the meteor’s trajectory and also tweak the transparency, luminosity and the intensity of the dust layer. There is a videotutorial about this effect on my own channel: www.youtube.com/3dluistutorials . I also speak more extensively about modeling, shaders, lights and postpro for this clip.

Luis Tejeda is a freelance 3D artist. He is located in Chicago, IL, USA.
If you are interested in his work, you can contact him at:

3dluis@gmail.com
http://www.3dluistutorials.com/portfolio

Igor Gonzalez is the brilliant winner of Battle:London, an internet contest announced by VFXlearning,  http://www.vfxlearning.com/,  the goal of the contest was setting up London city center being attacked by Aliens in the style of recent film Battle:LA, mixing real footage with 3D models and effects. In this article Igor tell us how he managed to got his great clip,

My initial idea for the clip part of getting a frantic pace in the video because the movie Battle: LA, the source of the challenge, is featured by close-ups and fast action. That’s why I decided to overlap the movement of combat ships in a few frames, just enough to be intelligible, also to show as many of them as possible on screen, that’s the way I made my first animation.
The first thing I had to do was match-moving of real camera, and it was not easy, since due to the shutter speed that was recorded was a lot of  blur and I had to do a manual tracking almost frame by frame. Due to the lack of parallax in the footage I had to choose a camera tripod type and the integration of 3D elements was more complicated, I had to use Google Earth satellite maps for the location of the elements in the match-moving.

MODELING

For the clip I made a few buildings, or pieces of them, and some detail of the ships and tank, battle ships are from my colleague Jorge Sanchez. The shading of all elements is mine. It would have been great to have more time to work on it because I think texture is most noticeable in the integration.

ANIMATION & RIGGING

All the rigging of the scene are mine, the ships have a basic rig just to control the turbines and parts of the wings, and some MEL scripting to automate the animation of the guns recoil when shooting and control its speed. The tank has a simple rig will implement a system that allows the wheels to rotate with the chains if the tank progresses. The animation of the fall of the ship is made with Maya rigid bodies, along with animation keyframing. To achieve the best possible physical realism, the pieces were generated with Pulldownit.

FX DESTRUCTION

The destruction of the arc of the terrace and the rear building are done with Pulldownit free plugin, this was my first attempt with this tool and honestly I was pleasantly surprised, both were modeled so that they are thoroughly realistic break (the fragments were generated with Voronoi-based free script though), there is an explosion in the rear term above that generates thousands and thousands of glass fragments (sadly hard to be appreciated). However, I didnt like the final timing of the simulation so I modified it after baking keys.

DUST & SMOKE

Maya classic particles were used for generating the secondary debris as instances of other fragments and some basic MEL for turns, variation of mass, size, etc.. they were also used for smoke of missiles, especially PP-ramps,  and finally added collision events to generate sparks in the tank due to impacts. For the caps of the ships I used nParticles instead, because its dynamic behavior allows them to bounce on impact with the ground. Finally I used Maya fluids in the smoke and fire from the building on the right, the dust generated by the ship in contact with the ground (particle emitting fluids) and the meteorite falling from the sky. I used near 6 GB of memory for all of this.

LIGHTS & RENDER

The lighting was done with the IBL technique, using an HDRI image downloaded from a free site and retouched in Photoshop, to better simulate the floor of the scene and to darken the bottom of the ships and adapt it to the tones of the real camera footage. All shaders count with tone-mapping with a gamma correction as the camera has and exposure control and lighting gradients are more realistic. Thanks to the render layers manager of Maya I could do the render in the time required, as are a lot of layers and it allows to launch render queues with various configurations (software renderer or mental ray) at a time.

POST PRODUCTION

I used After Effects, because although such a project would have NUKE best result, in the end I have more experience with After Effects and given the short time that I had not wanted to risk. I must say AE behaved very well, was stable with near 200 layers, great!!
I had to fix the automatic change of exposure of the real camera also added some Action Essentials to give more prominence to the computer generated effects, because eventually I had no time to generate all of them.

Finally, look closer to Terminator Salvation than Battle LA, but I wanted to risk a little and give a more aggressive look. And I couldn’t resist the temptation to make a nod to Michael Bay, I put a lens flare in the purest style Transformers.

Shot Breakdown:

Igor Blog,
http://www.igorgonvfx.com/Home/Index.html