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.

Clememt explains how he broke a Cg piano using Pulldownit for his “Bach in the days” teaser

The Rewind teaser was done with MAYA, pulldownit plugin and After effects.

So first i shattered my piano in 500 pieces and i make it explode with a cylinder which collide the piano from the back to the front….the render was done with Mental ray and the scene was shooted at 300 fps.

The footage of Rewind was static so there was no tracking to did. So i started the compositing in after effects (i choosed to render with multi pass for more flexibility) with color correction, DOF… and the first impression was : the footage of rewind seems stick above the background, he wasn’t integrated well. I decided to render some particles in alpha…without background and integrate the pass above rewind.

I was really happy to work with Pulldownit because all is done quick…when you shatter an object it’s done in few seconds, also for the animation, when you bake it, you can rewind, forward in real time. The physics properties are great, in my case the particles collide themself and they give a realistic sensation…. It was a real support on this project and to be honest if i hadn’t found it, it would influenced the artistic direction…

TENAS Website
http://www.tenas-graphism.fr/

Brief interview with IanZeigler about the making of his stunning Open MAC shots using Pulldownit Macos version.

How did you arrive to the idea of these shots?

We were given the task of creating a generic open for the MAC conference (college football and basketball) to air on our local sports network (sportstime ohio).  We knew we wanted to show all the college logos in some type of 3D environment.  With only about 2-3 weeks to go from concept to final product with a staff of 3 people.  I wanted to make some banners and maybe a generic stadium with some logos crashing around.  Looking at lots of different references i liked the “warhammer” look for school battling it out.  From there i started quick sketches.   Due to time constraints any architectural elements were taken out of the equation.  Once i had a general idea i started building pieces in 3D there is no time to waste.

Which tools have you used for making this shot?

pen, paper, Maya 2011, PDI plug-in, After Effects & Photoshop.

do you feel software usually help you to develop your ideas or mostly do >> you feel computers limits your creativity too often? 

Occasionally through the process of working i stumble across a “happy accident” and something cool is born, but most of the time i feel the computer is limiting and i’m wrestling to achieve the look i want.

which effects was Pulldownit used for?

Mostly just the logos breaking through the ground planes.

How did you drive the interaction between animated objects with simulated ones?

I set up one passive ground plane that everything sits on and 2 subdivided cubes for destructable ground to vary the soil layer thicknesses.  I proceeded to pre shatter the 2 ground cubes in areas i knew the logos would smash through using the “shatterit” feature of PDI once everything was pre shattered i used PDI fracture basic (which is super cool) to put everything into a group type thing ready to be destroyed.  I did build stand in objects “collision shapes” that matched the modeled logos so i could animate those to break the ground planes.  Then i just tweaked some solver setting and adjusted gravity and started baking simulations out at 80-120 fps depending on the shots.

how did you combine dust & debris?

Once i had all my geometry baked out i had stuff to emit particle instanced debris from and used Maya fluids to create thick dust.

Tell us your feelings about Pulldownit at this moment, even whishes about  future development.

I find it overall nice just if the shatter tool could shatter crooked lines on geometry not just straight ones would be great.

I was running into problems trying to motion blur the baked geometry.  because the key frames wouldn’t go past 360….the animation graph looked like a saw tooth.  so when i did add motion blur the debris looked like fish flopping around…

maybe add GPU acceleration?

Tell us a little about yourself, your background, future projects..

I interned at industrial design firms in high school looking to start a career as a product designer.   I went to college at the Cleveland institute of art because they have an excellent ID program.  Then of course once in school i started doing more creative stuff, drawing, animating, installations, and decided to go down the 3D generalist route because i knew i could apply 3D to lots of different areas.  architecture, product visualization, creative, etc.  After college i got a job at NBC and Sportstime Ohio in Cleveland doing broadcast graphics and mostly show opens and packages and news sponsors.   And thats where i am now.  Still learning and always trying to improve my skills.

Pulldownit Pluign makes the interaction with animation characters and dynamics objects very easy, here three nice examples of it by Andres de Mingo

Recircle have used Pulldownit free version in this appealing documentary about the ancient history of Dubrovnik, known as the ‘pearl of Adriatic’ in Croatia. Denis Valentic at charge of this production tell us about his experience with Pulldownit:

Regarding the History of Dubrovnik Project, the client had contacted us few
months prior to actual production start so we had a little time for
research and preparation. Production itself, from the start to the
completion lasted for exactly two moths. The final product was a 13 minutes
stereoscopic 2k short film about chosen major Dubrovnik’s historical
moments.
Earthquake sequence was targeted to last around 30-something seconds and I
had a week to produce it. First I started with setting the camera movement
and, when I was satisfied, I proceeded with breaking buildings (only ones)
visible to camera. For this I used Fracture Voronoi script – being free
and stable was a big plus.

I ended up having twenty-one building and twenty-seven thousand pieces.
Next, I had to knock it down somehow. I started with max reactor and :: K
a b o o M :: script, but this wasn’t working for me. Then somebody
on cgsociety mentioned PullDownIt. After initial test I was won over.
Don’t know where to start; speed, stability, ease of use and so on and so
forth. I know it sounds like an advert but really it’s not. If you’re alone
in studio going crazy at 3 AM and nothing is working and then everything is
breaking apart from the first try, pure pleasure! So, from there on –
everything was easy; I opened a new scene with one house in it, broke it,
collapsed it with Pdi!, adjusted keyframes and repeated this for
twenty-something times. Finally everything ended up/fit in one scene. Nice
and easy

Author web site:

http://www.recircle.net/