Ideaform3d has published a nice tutorial showcasing Pulldownit new bounded cracks feature. The tutorial shows step by step how to create a crack along a Moai statue all inside Maya 2022 using PDI plugin,
Project files can be downloaded by clicking in the link included in the text of the tutorial below,
Ideaform3d is a youtube channel featuring nice and easy to follow tutorials showcasing useful plugins and scripts for Maya, 3dsMax and After Effects, worth to check it!
Andres de Mingo, author of this striking shot, kindly explains us how he did the dynamics effects using Pulldownit plugin inside 3ds Max.
I love those ancient bridges in Center Europe, with its old stones and statues plenty of history, I thought it would be dramatic seeing it being affected by a earthquake and tried to depict it in this little VFX project.
Cracking the bridge
The platform of the bridge is actually a large thin box textured with a combination of paving stones and a grass shaders, I drawed a long 3ds max spline over the box and then used Shatter it tool to generate around 1000 shards around it, I added a second set of shards but this time making shatter width smaller and changing the Shatter Seed value to get a different pattern, finally I added an Uniform Shatter pattern of around 200 fragments to get rid of too large shards appearing at both sides of the spline.
I created a PDI Fracture Body for the platform and a PDI Cracker along the spline, to speed up testing I set Local Propagation for the fractures, also to prevent fragments flying away too much I set a low value for the Cracker multiplier.
Making paving stones exploding
After I was happy with the main crack, I started adding more destruction on the bridge, for blasting group of cobbles I reshattered the platform in different areas near the spline, this time using PDI Local Shatter, 200 shards per exploding area was enough, following by creating clusters for each area, PDI Increase Selection tool is great for this, setting the cluster Hardness to 0 and adding a low break energy to get the exploding effect. Then I had just to set the break frame per cluster at the correct time to get the explosions happening one after another.
Crumbling the Statues
There are 5 statues on each bridge border, that’s makes a total of 10 models to shatter and destroy, this can be quite a lot of work, but I managed to speed up things by using some clever Pulldownit features. I started by drawing a spline over the statue surface and creating a cracker for it, then shattering the model with PDI path based style in around 300 shards, and adding an Uniform shatter pass of around 50 shards to get rid of large fragments on the model, finally I added also a couple of small PDI Local shatter shards in some borders of the statue. By creating a fracture body and setting it to static and only break I got the statue crumbling nicely without breaking it completely.
But for the statues in the background I did it much simpler, I made the model adquiring the shattering of the version in close up view, using PDI Adquire shatter style, then creating some cluster to make the statue starting crumbling at the desired frame , that’s did the trick perfectly.
Conclusions
This shot involved several models to be damaged and cracked, thanks to the easy of use and clever features of Pulldownit I was able to have all destruction effects done and adjusted in a short time. I like specially PDI Jagginess , this feature add detail to inner faces so cracks looks rough and more realistic when rendering the scene without having to create complex shader for them.
Our focus in this new update of Pulldownit plugin for Maya is making user experience smoother and more responsive for FX artists and freelancers, we realize Maya is broadly used for animation so we have gone deep into the solver code and got a much faster update per frame of deforming meshes, so now there is almost no performance penalty for character skins or nCloth shapes included in PDI dynamics as kinematic objects.
Besides as any realistic destruction effect needs dust around we are glad to introduce a new tool “Attach particles to fragments”, by using this little utility you can stick Maya nParticles to faces per material and therefore emit easily fluids or additional debris from inner faces only, removing the need to go to another DCC tool to paint a white and black map as guide for emission, of course you can still use this classic workflow in Maya, this new tool is just an alternative a fast way to emit from selected faces only, actually this tool can be used for any task you need to attach particles to faces in Maya aside PDI itself.
Esteban Cuesta has done this great tutorial showing some of the enhancements inside Pulldownit 4.5 and featuring how to emit dust from fragments using this new PDI tool along with Maya fluids.
Also several fracture parameters can now be animated if you need to, and we have added a new event to switch cracks propagation mode at desired frame, so you can make your model getting damaged locally for some time and then destroy it completely at specific frame just by enabling this event.
And there are more enhancements regarding usability, a new tool for easier fragments selection when creating clusters from small shards, generation of different takes for standing models getting damaged is now an easy task with the improved behavior of “Static-Only Break” fracture option and quite a few annoying bugs of previous version has been fixed.
Below listed the most relevant highlights in Pulldownit 4.5
NEW FEATURES
New Tool for adding particles to faces per material, this little utility spread Maya nParticles over faces per material, so you can later emit easily extra debris, dust or smoke only from chosen faces.
Hi-poly animated meshes 3x times faster update in dynamics, animated or deforming meshes such as character`s skin are now updated very fast during simulation providing a smoother experience when including them in destruction scenes.
New “increase Selection” option for easier clusters creation, selecting groups of small fragments is much easier now using this new tool which select neighboring fragments in the same area just with one click.
“Only Breaks” fracture option captures larger cracks and detachments, this useful feature forces the model to stand while being impacted, its behaviour has been improved so now it can generate larger cracks and detachments when they doesn’t jeopardize the overall structure, this effect is more noticeable when using it in conjunction with Clusterize level.
Fracture body Friction, Bounciness, Sec cracks and Damping parameters can be animated, get more artistic control over your fracture simulation by animating these parameters if needed.
Rigid body Friction, Bounciness, and Mass parameters can be animated, get more artisitic control over your rigid bodies simulations by animating these parameters if needed.
Added ability to change propagation scheme at frame, user can now damage an object only locally for some time then change to continuous propagation at desired frame to break it completely.
New option to show/hide/select all disabled rigid bodies in scene, it is easy to lost track of disabled rigid bodies, with this handy new option you can select all at once to enable or delete them or hide from the viewport all disabled rigid bodies with just one click
Adquire Shatter can transfer animation from single shape node to multi shape nodes, transferring fragments animation to nodes with multiple combined shapes is now supported by Shatterit tool.
Read the full list of fixes in the Pulldownit web site version logs
KineticThoughts 