Thinkinetic is proud sponsor of this year “A Day in the City” challenge by Evermotion.
We invite our participants to take a look at the city and all it offers for inhabitants and tourists. Restaurants, amusement parks, wonderful buildings, busy streets, shopping malls – city is living and evolving all the time. This We believe that this theme will be versatile enough to bring many great arch-viz works to life.
You can summit your work until 16th of January, 2019
Pulldownit Pro license is one of the valuable prizes and there are plenty of them, those interested can check rules and prizes here:8
Pulldownit , the destruction plugin, is already available for 3d Max 2019, this update includes also a number of bug fixes you can read in the Pulldownit version logs pages,
The major additions to 3d Max 2019 are support and editing tools for OSL shaders, a new procedural wood material and booleans operation fro splines similar to those for 3D shapes, this may look like not enough to justify a major version but the new policy of Autodesk is to include new features regularly in software updates, they dit it in Max 2018 with paramount additions like Max fluids , VR support, new spline tools and important Arnold render updates, so there will be probably interesting features to come in futher updates of Max 2019.
Booleans operation for splines is an useful addition as it is faster and safer to modify a spline with booleans and then extrude it than applying booleans directly to 3d shapes which many times fails to do it correctly.
The new procedural wood material is nice, has quite a lot of controls to adjust the wooden look, like colour, roughness, number of wood rings and shape of the ribbon stripes, but I miss controls to add grime and scratches, just my suggestion for future updates, currently you can get a nice polished wooden look but not an old spoil wood material.
OSL shaders are also worth to check, they are well integrated in the Slate materials editor and the possibilities to create procedural shaders are endless.
Important to mention OSL shaders and procedural wood material are supported by Arnold render and also by Pulldownit plugin so you can shatter objects with these procedural shaders applied perfectly.
Changsoo Eun, 3d artist, has written an interesting overview of OSL shaders in 3d Max 2019 you can read here,
Evermotion challenge 2017 “ The Perfect Getaway” has ended, as sponsor of the competition Thinkinetic is proud to gift a Pulldownit Pro license to the winners, congratulations to all of them.
Take a look to the winners works and best finalists in the official announcement:
In this excellent tutorial Esteban Cuesta shows us how to destroy a pile of tubes using Pulldownit in Maya and then export it to Unreal Engine 4, but not only this, he also teaches us how to trigger the destruction in UE4 when a bullet hits the model during the game. Exporting broken models and dynamics to UE4 works with either Pro version and free version of Pulldownit, just follow the tutorial to learn how to add quality destruction effects into your game.
These are the breaking letters demos Esteban Cuesta made as a final example of his tutorials on shattering text with Pulldownit plugin, you can find this tutorial a couple of articles below. Esteban Cuesta kindly explains some details about the making steps.
I wanted to make a video as a final demostration of my breaking letters tutorials with Pulldownit 3.7, I designed demo #1 as a classic letters intro, quick and lively, the motion of each word is animated until it touch the word below, then I activate the fracture bodies so pieces of letters start to crumble and fall, I used a Wind field to stress the debris falling effect. The final destruction was as easy as animating the word “Pulldownit” so it pass through the whole text and set it is a kinematic rigid body but I switched to “Convex hull” Bounding Volume to speed up the testing, the dynamics looked good anyway so I used it for the final shot too.
Doing the first shot wasn’t difficult at all and pretty funny, this encouraged me to make a longer one. This time a decided to add a plate showing the different shatter styles of Pulldownit with letters, all styles except “Wood splinters” as I think this style doesn’t make sense for letters.
All sets are done in the same way, using the 3D Max text tool to generate each word and making the endings fit each other simply by adjusting text size and kerning, and then collapsing all the words in a single poly object. At this point I applied the intended shatter style and create a fracture body for all pieces. For the Radial style plate I used an animated sphere to trigger the destruction, I simply hid it when rendering the scene, for the Path style I used the great crackers objects of Pulldownit as triggers, the rest of plates uses a Wind field to trigger the destruction, animating its Strength in order to get a increasing amount of falling debris.
Rendering was done using Mental ray in 3D Max, applying a high reflectance material to the letters and a less polished glossy material with the same colour to the inner faces after breaking.
Pulldownit worked very well , I haven’t any issue aside tweaking the parameters to get the dynamic behavior I wanted, It was very intuitive and fast computing using it.
Our main focus in this update has been to increase plugin reliablity and improve to the maximum several already outstanding features. All reported bugs so far have been fixed, working with hi-poly meshes for shatter and dynamics is faster and several options for fracturing has been adjusted following users experience, thanks to all that contribute to continuously improve Pulldownit plugin.
Besides Shatterit tool has been enhanced to break holed shapes like 3D letters correctly, watch shattering letters intro and video tutorials by Esteban Cuesta
Shattering Letters 3D Max Video Tutorial
Shattering Letters Maya Video Tutorial
v 3.7 Enhancements:
Perfect shattering of holed concave shapes like 3D letters
20% speed up shatter for hi-poly meshes
Improved behavior of fracture bodies option “Break Upon Impact” specially with force fields
“Force convex shapes” is now the default for fracture bodies creation, allowing very fast and stable fracture dynamics in most cases.
Fixes for 3ds Max plugin:
Fixed rigid body masses overrided after reseting scene
Fixed jagginess doesnt apply to fragments with multi uvs
Fixed shatter crash when non-convex faces are present
Fixed seed 0 doesnt generate diferent point cloud each time
Fixed Radial shatter generated aligned points on the borders
Fixed fragments slide weirdly on the grid plane
Fixed 3d Max crash when apply jagginess to concave faces
Fixed 3d Max crash sometimes after making scene->new and resetting simulation
Fixed 3d Max crash after shattering an object with modifiers applied sometimes
Fixed shatter preview point cloud weird displacement with excentric objects
Fixed Fracture bodies attach nearby fragments each other regardless threshold sometimes
Fixed Fracture bodies ignores breakable by frame clusters when fragments are sleeping
Fixes For Maya Plugin:
Fixed local shatter pivot doesnt fit to surface by default
Fixed missed normals for holed faces
Fixed seed 0 doesnt generate diferent point cloud each time
Fixed hidden scene layers are showed after loading a scene
Fixed shatter locator get selection lost when moving it in preview mode
Fixed Undo queue turned off after some plugins operations
Fixed Radial shatter generated aligned points on the borders
Fixed reshatter in preview mode fails when UI units diferent than cm
Fixed fragments slide weirdly on the grid plane
Fixed shatter preview point cloud weird displacement with excentric objects
Fixed Shatter Undo all delete ground grid when there arent Pdi bodies in scene
Fixed Fracture bodies attach nearby fragments each other regardless threshold sometimes
Fixed Fracture bodies ignores breakable by frame clusters when fragments are sleeping
Fixed Advanced fractures window doesnt clean-up after scene new
