Blow up Stuff! with 3ds Max

So we're going to take a look at the first technique to break object into pieces. So
what we have here is we've got two objects that are single objects. So this is one object
here, and I've got another one here, which is a whole object.
If I grab this one, you'll see that it's an editable mesh, and the editable mesh has a
nice tool called [? Expose. ?] If you scroll down here, you'll see that there's an Explode
tool. By default, the value's 24. It's a degree of tolerance. So it's 24 degrees of tolerance.
If two faces have less than 24 degrees, they are going to be kept together, and if there
are more than 24 degrees between them, they're going to be broken into two separate pieces.
If you want to break all of these into per face so every face becomes a single object,
what you can do set the tolerance here to zero, and say Explode, and it's going to create
an explosion, and all of these here will be separate faces. If I just go here, and grab,
and move it, you'll see that now this is separate faces.
For simulation purposes, when we're going to go to simulation, you see that the pivot
point for all of the faces that I'm selecting is centered at the center of the original
pivot point of the object. So we want to center all of the pivot points for all these objects
to the center of the actual objects. I'm going to select all of these objects, go into the
[INAUDIBLE] key, affect pivot only and center objects. And this is an operation that we're
going to do a lot because when for simulation, this is something we need to do to get good
results. Otherwise, the pivot point gives you a weird result when you simulate. So all
of these are now centered to the object.
The other thing that you'll notice is that they don't have any thickness. So if I-- oops,
I lost my selection-- going to select that again. I'm going to apply a shell modifier.
And the shell modifier, if I go to wireframe, you'll see what it looks like. It gives a
thickness. If I turn off or if I just make the outer amount to zero, and I just crank
up the inner amount just a little bit, just to get a bit of thickness, something like
that-- now what I've got is the thickness that I need, and I'm just going to convert
everything back to an editable mesh. And if we go back to realistic here, you'll see that
all of these are now editable mesh, but they have a thickness to them, so they're going
to be easily to simulate. They're going to work in the simulation. They're going to have
a thickness.
The other way to use the Explode tool is, you see that all of these are separate elements.
If I go into the element mode, I grab this element, this is an element. So every part
here is an element. And I'd like to break that by element. So I can still use the Explode
tool, but the Explode tool-- now I'm going to make the tolerance to be 180. So that's
pretty much tolerating every phase that is attached to each other will be broken together.
So any phase that is not attached, which is the concept of the element, will be separated.
So if I just say Explode here, what you're going to get is this result where this is
an object, and this is an object, and all of these are separate objects. So that's kind
of cool, but the thing is that we need to remember that the pivot point is not changed
for all of these. I'm going to go into the [INAUDIBLE] key, affect pivot only, center
to object, and now we've got multiple objects ready to be simulated. The same tool is not
available in Edit Poly, so if I've got an object like this here, and I take a look at
Edit Poly, there's no Explode tool in there. So, of course, you can convert it to an editable
mesh, and then convert it back to an editable poly.
But instead of doing that, I'll show you kind of the idea behind this. If I go into element
mode, if I want to break my element, I'm going to grab that element here, and I'll say Detach,
and it's going to detach that element separately. So now this is an object here, and it's moving
aside, and this is an object here, and that's my original object. Of course, the same idea--
I would go here and say affect pivot only, center to object, and we got something like
that.
The other thing is that-- let's say that I've got an object like this-- I've created the
script to automate the process, so it's going to be included with the folder, with the project
for the class, so if I go to the macro script, I'm just going to say Open Script, and I'm
going to go to the scripts folder, and you see there's a script here called break poly's
elements. So I'm going to open it up, so that you can see how it looks like. You see that
it's a macro script, so when we're going to execute the script, nothing's going to happen,
but it's going to be available as a tool that I can place on a hotkey or in quad menus,
and that tool will be in the category called AU Tools, and it's called Explode Polygon
by Face. So I'm going to run it once, evaluate. Of course, nothing happens. Then I can go
in to Customize, Customize User Interface, and I'll put into the quad menu so that I
can have an easy access to that tool. So if I go to the quad menus, we set category AU
Tools, it's there, and Explode Polygon by Face. So if I want to put it in by quad menu,
I'm just going to drag it here, and, as you can see, I already placed it. So I'm just
going to delete that item here, and it's already available there, so I can right click, and
you see that it's right here, Explode Polygon by Face. So if I just open it up here, you
can Explode by element or by polygons, so I'm just going to go here and say explode
by element.
And now that it's done, you see that all of the pivot point are centered to those elements,
and all of these now, everything that was an element inside of this object, is now broken
into pieces, including that globe here that is in the middle. And I'd like to break this
globe. by face, but it's this kind of a regular pattern there, so I'd like to change it so
that it feels like it's a windows breaking. So if I go to the modeling tools, I'm just
going to go into editable poly mode. If I go to vertex manipulation mode-- if I grab
the vertex here, and I start to manipulate, I'm going to start changing the shape of this.
If I want to keep the shape so that the vertices are following the surface, I can constraint
here, and turn on the constrained by face. And then if I try to move in any direction,
you'll see that it's kind of staying always to that surface of that poly. So I can start
to move them around like this, and start to have a shape. That is a little bit more interesting.
So all of these will be broken by polygons, so every polygon that is there, it will give
me a different-- oops, grab this here, and move it in a different direction, and things
like that. And if you want to move, I have an easy moving setup. I can go and work in
screen mode, and it's a much easier way to move these vertices around.
Also, if you want to add more details to the cracks, I can go and use the Cut tool, and
the Cut tool allows me to go in from a vertex to an edge, or just from an edge to another
edge, and maybe there, and cut to here, and you can start to generate very interesting
pattern for the breaking by polygons.
So now that you're done with this, if you wanted to separate this manually, you would
go here and you would select a face, you would go, and you would say detach. And when it's
detached, it's now an individual object, so I can grab this face. I can, again, center
the pivot point to that new object. If I move it out, you'll see that it has no thickness,
so I would add a shell modifier here, shell to give it a little bit of thickness, and
that would be my fragment for this one. Of course, it can be manual. Doing it manually
can take a lot of time, so what you can do is grab the actual editable poly. If I go
and Explode by polygon in the script here, and say Explode, what it's going to do, it's
going to give you a thickness for everything. Got out of the isolation modes, but that's
fine. I'll go back into wireframe here, and we'll see that the tool gives you the shell
modifier automatically, so you can just give it a bit of thickness. And when you're done
with the thickness, just say collapse stack, and you'll see that all of the new objects
that are created will have their own thickness, and the pivot point will be centered. So it's
a nice way to break all of these into pieces.
So now what we have is-- this is a piece. All of these is broken into fragments. And
the globe here in the middle is all separated by face, so it's going to give us a nice simulation
setup for later. Okay, for the second technique of breaking objects into pieces, we're going
to use a technique that I really like. And it's using Pro Cutter inside of the compound
objects of 3DS Max. But to work with that, you need to have volumes that are water-tight
closed. So we need to do a few checks before we start to break objects using this technique.
So we've got a bridge here, and this is a theme that's going to be recurrent throughout
the whole presentation. But we've got a bridge structure, and we're going to start to break
it with this technique. So I'm just going to isolate the base here, and you see that
there's some holes there, so we need to fix that. If you want to check your geometry,
there's a nice-- now it's an editable poly-- if you want to check if everything's right,
there's a nice modifier called STL Check. And when you turn it on, it's going to tell
you where the errors are, and it's going to select the faces that are adjacent to where
the problems are. So you see there's a hole here, on the other side. It's close, so we
need to fix that problem. The quick way to fix this, there's a nice modifier call cap
holes. When you apply it-- and I'm going to put it below the STL check-- you see that
it caps the hole-- and if I go to STL Check, and turn it on now, and check again, you see
that now we have no errors. So it's a nice way of fixing holes that you have in your
geometry before you want to use this technique.
So now that it's closed, it's ready to be cut using a Pro Cutter. So I'll show you a
base technique to just start with. I'll go and I'll create a plane. And I'll make sure
that this plane has a lot of segments, so here, 50 by 50's good. And I'm going to draw
this plane here in that area. If I take a look at the edge faces, this is what we get
for the plane. I'm going to apply a noise modifier on this plane, and this is just to
get a bit of irregularities on the surface there, so it's not a perfectly straight cut.
So if I just increase the strength here in zed, and reduce the scale here-- not too much,
but somewhere around three, maybe-- we're going to get some nice noise pattern on that.
And I'm going to go into the material editor, and I've created the material for that, and
that's kind of a concrete kind of pattern there that you have, that's going to be the
inside of the cut. What's great about this technique is that when we're going to cut
this object using this plane, the material is being projected on the cut surface, giving
you a nice result.
So I'm going to align this object here to the center, so center, center, and I'm just
going to orbit around just so that we have a cut. What's important is that when you do
a cut like this, the plane or the cut geometry, the 2D geometry, needs to be fully cutting
the big one here, the geometry that we want to cut. Okay, so we've got our noise. I'm
going to apply a UV map. That's going to be important, because the UV map is also going
to be applied to the cut surface. I can go here in planar mode. I can align in zed or
in y or whatever, so I'm going to start in zed, something like that. And then I'm going
to go into the gizmo mode, and just align that UV map so that it kind of fits with the
shape of this here. Oops. Pressed the wrong hotkey. So I'm just going to turn around here
like that, and I'm just going to scale that gizmo, something like that, and something
like that. Not going to be too precise. You get the idea. And something like that, and
then go into scaling and scale it like so. So now, the map here will be applied to kind
of fit with that area here, maybe rotate it a little bit more so that the projection is
more straight, something like that, and we got our planar UV mapping.
So now that this is done, I can go into the compound objects, and the Pro Cutter is here.
When I click on Pro Cutter, I need to have a first cutter selected, so 2D geometry needs
to be selected. So I'm going to go here, say Pro Cutter. I want to keep the inside and
the outside of the cut. And because I'm using Max 2012, if I want to apply the material
to cut material to the surface, I cannot autoextract or explode by Element, and I'll show you how
to get around that. But now I'm going to go here and say pick stuck object, and it's going
to cut this object here, and you see that we have the line of the cut. And now we're
ready to break it by element, because it's still a single object. So I'm just going to
escape that here. Turned that off, so it's still a single object here. I pressed the
X key, so that's probably why. So if I just blew it up, it's a single object. So I want
to break it by elements. We've seen that we've got this nice little script that allows you
to break by elements. I'm going to say Explode, and now we have two pieces. And you see that
the material here is applied to the cut face like that.
Another technique here, I'm just going to grab the road, and we want to break it and
kind of fragment it in the middle. So I'm going to go into the top view, and I'm going
to use the wireframe mode, and I'm going to draw a line that will define the cut that
I want to do like that. So it's just a 2D line, something like that, and maybe want
to add a bit more detail in that area. And again, I need to cross the whole geometry.
If I go back to perspective view, something like that, I can bring this up, and I can
apply the extrude modifier. And the extrude modifier will allow me to bring that line
through the whole geometry. So that's another way to create a cutter that will give you
exactly the result you want.
So if I select the Cutter, go into compound object, Pro Cutter, now I don't really care
about applying the material from this Cutter to the road. I'll keep the same material so
I can turn on autoextract mesh and Explode by element, pick the stuck object, and here
we go. I can delete the Cutter, and now you'll see that we've got two objects, and they kept
the same material here in the middle. So that's why we didn't bother about the UV mapping
and the mapping of the cut object. So this is another way to cut objects like that.
If you want to create lines like this but from a custom direction, when you create 2D
lines, they're always going to be created on the active grid, or if you turn on Autogrid,
they're going to be created on the first click of your objects. But what you can do as well
is something like that. I can create a grid, and put it anywhere in the scene, and then
I can orbit around and say I want to cut maybe from that direction, from that point of view.
I'd like to create a line that will cut from that direction. And I'll select that grid,
and I'll say align to view, align in zed, I'll go into screen manipulation mode, and
I'll just bring it in front of the mesh here. You see that it's kind of cutting true, so
what I'll do is I'll just bring it forward in zed, something like that, a bit more so
that it's in between the geometry and my point of view. And again, align it to the view in
zed to make sure that it's still aligned to the point of view. Now while the grid is selected,
I could say activate that grid, and if I go into line creation mode, you'll see that now
I can go here and say cut this geometry with that line from that current point of view,
and I'm going to deactivate that grid, it or just reactivate the home grid, and you'll
see that as I orbit around, this line was created from that point of view.
Same idea-- I'm going to grab that line and say extrude, something like that, and make
sure that it cuts the whole geometry, something like that. And now we're ready to go, and
I'll say Pro Cutter, compound object, Pro Cutter. I'll, to enable all of these options,
pick the stock object, and now we've got to cut, can delete the Cutter, and I've got those
two pieces now as separate geometry.
One last technique that I want to show for using this--this is kind of the technique
that I use all the time, so I want to give you some of the tricks-- let's say that I've
got a bitmap here that defines a cracking pattern that I'd like to use, so I'll decide
again the point of view of the projection. So I'll take that bitmap, and I'll align it
to the view, and I'll go and I'll bring it here in between the object and the point of
view. I'll just make sure that we reduce the visibility of this, maybe 0.2, so that we
can see through it, and we can still see the crack. Then I can go into line creation mode,
and I'll turn on Autograd. By default, it's off, so I'll make sure that it's on. And now
I can click the first time on that surface, and it's going to create that line based on
the bitmapped plane that is there. So I can go and follow that crack, something like that
here, like so, and get out of that geometry. And I can create another one here. So I'm
going to make another line, something like that, that will follow the second one like
so.
So now we're done with this. I can delete that bitmap. I don't need it anymore. It's
just a plane. You see that it's created the two in the direction that I wanted. I'm going
to select the two, apply the extrude modifier, and make sure that it cuts through the whole
geometry. And then I'll grab the first cutter, not the two at the same time, because I want
to find the order. So you see that this cutter here doesn't cut through the whole geometry,
but it will cut through the second piece here, so I will define that in order. So I will
select this first one here, go into Pro Cutter. I'll, again, turn on all of these options,
and I'll pick the stock object. It's going to break it. I can delete that cutter. Then
I can grab the second cutter, turn on Pro Cutter, again turn all of these options, pick
the stock object, and pick that second piece there, and now I've got the object broken,
exactly like the breaking pattern that we had on the bitmap. So it's a nice technique
to create very precise pattern of breaking of objects, if you have [INAUDIBLE] objects
that are very close to the camera, you want to break it them very precisely, that's a
nice technique to use.
If we want to cut using Pro Cutter, and we have a surface like this that is a pretty
much a solid, but we'd like it to have just a small thickness, going to make it a hollow
surface, a hollow model, you can use the technique that I'm going to show. So this is a typical
case if you have a statute or anything that's-- a whole geometry that you would only have
the thickness. You can use a shell modifier to create a geometry, or you can also use
the technique that I'm going to show. So in order to do this, what I'll do is I'll just
clone this object, and I'll make it a reference. And the reason why I'm doing a reference is
that the modifiers that I'll apply to here will apply only to this new clone, but the
original object still has a reference, so if it's modified, we're going to get those
modification as well. So I'm going to go into wireframe mode, see what's going to happen.
I'm going to apply the push modifier on this reference, and I'm going to reduce the push
here. Instead of going in positive, I'm just going to go in negative value, and it's going
to create a second geometry that is inside here. On top of that push modifier, what I'll
do is I'll apply an edit poly modifier, edit poly. And I'll select all of the faces, and
I want those faces to point inward, so I'll just make sure that we flip them. So if I
go here and say flip, now they're pointing inward, which is exactly what we want.
But the thing about this technique of cutting with Pro Cutter, it needs to be an open geometry.
So now it's a closed geometry, which means that it's a volume, and it has a hole inside.
But we need to have an exterior access to that hole if we want it to work. So what I'll
do here is, now that we have the faces in the correct placement, I'll just convert it
back to an editable poly, and I'll attach the original one. And now we have the two
objects attached to each other. They're two separate elements, but I'm going to go here
into-- and I'm going to go back into realistic mode-- we need to create a hole somewhere
in there. So the best way is to go somewhere where it's not that visible. So I'm going
to select that phase here and delete it. I'm going to select the face that is inside. I'm
going to delete it as well, and then I'm going to grab all of the borders that are here.
And instead of capping them, I'm going to use the bridge tool, which is going to create
a bridge between those faces. So now we have a hole, and we have access, and it's a single
element, so it's a single closed volume, but we have access to the hole inside, so that's
going to work. So that's what we need to do in order to create a hollow surface.
So now if I just show you the cutters that I've created for this, it's just we want to
create some brick effects. So I'm going to grab one of these planes, and I'm going to
go into Pro Cutter, and I'm going to enable all of these options. I'm going to go pick
cutter objects. Since I've got a lot to pick, and I'm going to go manually, and go one by
one, I'm going use the select by name, and select all of the cutters, pick those. It's
going to take a few seconds to add all of them into the operation, into the modifier,
and when it's going to be all added, I can go here and say pick the stock object, and
grab this brick tower. So it's going to take, again, a few seconds, but it's going to break
that hollow surface, that hollow model, and because we created that hole, it's going to
wear perfectly, and we're going to get this set of bricks from that geometry. It takes
a few seconds, so done. I can delete that, and now I see that all of these are separate
bricks. If I just go back into turn off the edge faces, if I grab one of those here, and,
actually, if I want to simulate that later, something that we need to remember, affect
pivot only, and center to the objects. I've selected all of them here, and now we've got
all of these bricks separate. So if I just grab those here, and like that. So that's
kind of the idea. If you want to break a hollow surface, you can use the same technique, but
you need to create that inner element, flip the faces, and create a hole, and you'll be
able to use the Pro Cutters to break this object in pieces.
Okay, now let's take a look at how we can use particles to fill the volume of an object
in order to break it into very, very small fragments. This is a very useful if you break
a window, or if you break something that you want to break into dust or very small elements.
You can use this technique. So the idea is, when we are going to do the simulation later,
we are going to replace that object by the particle system, and this particle system
needs to look very, very close, and feel that volume is the exact same volume so that the
transition that goes from the object to the explosion is seamless.
So in order to do that, we're going to go into the particle view, which is our particle
editor inside of 3DS Max. Right now, it's empty. We don't have any particles created.
So I'm going to just drag in a standard flow, and the standard focus creates kind of an
explosion effect where the particle leaves the center of the particle flow icon. This
is not what we want, so I'm just going to delete the speed operator here. So all the
particles will be staying where they are when they are created, and we're going to think
about this simulation later. The birth, I want all of those particles to be created
at frame zero, and you see they're all visible now. And if I take a look at the render node
here at the top level, you see that by default, when we get a particle flow system, it only
shows 50% of the particles inside of the viewport. So when you're trying to fill a volume, that's
kind of misleading. So what I do is, I put it to 100% so that we can really see the type
of effect that we're going to get when we're going to transition to the particle system
for that.
So right now, we're displaying ticks. So I'm going to switch that to display the geometry.
We are set to cubes, and they're very big, so I'm going to reduce the size of those,
so it makes more sense to continue from here. And those will be the particles that I would
like to place into that volume. So to place them into the volume-- right now, they're
positioned on the icon, so I'm going to replace that by a position object operator, drag on
top of this position object, and I'm going to add this object here as being the emitter.
So now all of the particles are emitted from that object. I want to emit from the volumes
so that we have a filling volume, and not only to the surface. And then if I crank up
the amount of particles here, you'll see that they're all going to appear on that surface
there. And of course, I can reduce the size here and adjust all of that. The thing is,
we're going to think about the shape of the particles a bit later, but you see, the material
that is applied here is not the same as the filling object. So what I'll do is I'll create
a material static. I'm going to drag it in here, below the shape operator, so that we
can define the material here. Then I'm going to open up the material editor. I'm going
to drag in the same material that we have on the subject here. And actually, I need
to refresh this, so I'm going to drag it up, so that it's updating. So the material needs
to be above the cube, and I think you just need to drag it so that it updates in the
viewport.
But right now, you see that the mapping is not correct. So where we should have white
particles there, there's still red. So there's a nice little tool here called Mapping Objects.
I'm going to drag it in, and Mapping Object allows me to pick any object in the scene,
and now the mapping is taken from map channel one of this object. So as you can see now,
if I increase the number of particles, the particles that appear in the wider area here
will be-- so we're going to have a bit more. So you see, all of them here are white, and
all of the others are red, so it's going to fit exactly the look. So we're going to transition
from the real object to the particles. It's going to pretty much go like this, so if I
just hide the selection, we are able to see that it's going from the real object to particles.
And it's just a visibility animation to go from one to the other.
But, of course, now, cubes is not exactly what we would like. We'd like to have fragments
that looks a bit more like windows breaking. If you're in a car, and you break the window
of the car, it looks like salt breaking for the window. So cubes could work, but if you
want to have a geometry like this, you would like to have more fragments that look like
a class.
So what I've done is, I've created a setup of fragments here, and just going to show
you the edge faces. I'm taking the same volume, the same object, and I just broke it using
the Pro Cutter, so I broke it into pieces that look like window. So I'm going to select
all of them, and I'm going to group them. So now that it's one group, I'll be able to
do this here, where if I drag in a shape instance on top of the shape here, the shape instance
is now set to none. So I'm going to pick that group. I'm going to say use the group member.
And actually, I've got 2,000 now, so it's going to reduce that. So we can to have a
bit more of a manageable amount. Actually, even less than that 20, just to take a look
at what we're going to get.
So we are into shape instance, group member, and I'm going to enable this option here called
multishape random order. So it's going to randomize in between all of these shapes.
So, as you can see, I can set up the scale, I can set up some variation, and now you see
that all of those fragments will replace the cubes there. So if I just crank up the number
of particles there, you'll see that we get exactly the same thing. And the shape instance
here-- I'm going to drag it up so that we can have the materials-- I knew that the material
needs to be below that. If you don't get the material applied, just drag up and down to
get the refresh here of these modifiers. So if I go here-- let's say we said 2,000 particles--
we're going to get 2,000 of those glass fragments. And I can make them a bit smaller, something
like that, until I get something that is believable, not too small-- something like that. Let's
say 20%-- I think it's going to be good for the scaling here. And there we go. We got
our particle system.
And this is now going to be easy to transition from the original object to this. It's going
to be believable, and when we go to simulate the animation, we're going to get fragments
that looks like fragments of a window.
I wanted to take a quick look at one of the free scripts that are available out there.
They are quite useful, a few of them that I've mentioned in the class. It's good to
look for them. They can solve problems very quickly. And what I'll do today is I'll show
you the fracture voronoi, a tool that is available on Area. So it's area.autodesk.com. and you
look for fracture voronoi, you'll find it, and also on scriptspot.com, you'll find it
as well. But like I said, I've included with the project. So if I go in Mac script and
open the script, I'll just go into the scripts folder, and this is the fracture voronoi here,
1.1. So if I open it up, this is the script itself. I've modified it for the class, so
by default, it's not a macro script. It's just when you run it, it's going to open up
the window. So I've made it as a macro script so that you can put in the quad menus and
call it whenever you need it. So it's called fracture voronoi, and I've put it in the category
AU Tools so it's easy to find. So I'll execute that or evaluate it, and then if I go into
Customize, Customize User Interface. I'm going to open up the quad user interface editor.
Here we go. And I'm going to go category AU Tools, and you'll see that fracture voronoi
is now there, so I can just drag it in here, and now I'm going to have it available. So
it's already there, so I'm going to delete that. But this is how you add it to your quad
menus. Once it's there, right click, fracture voronoi. It's going to bring up that window.
You need to pick an object. You define in how many pieces you want to break it, so if
I say 25, enter, and press that button here called break in 25, it's going to break that
object in 25 pieces. If I want to break it again, I can pick another object. Let's say
this one here. Actually, let's pick something at the top here. So if I grab this one here,
and say break in 25, it's going to break this one in 25 again. So it's easy to go and say,
I want to break this one, select it, break in 25, and a very easy to do that. If I want
to break it into more pieces or less pieces, say maybe 30 pieces here, I'm going to select
this polygon here, and say, break in 30, and we're going to get this breakup. So very quick
way to break object into pieces. So if you don't have a [INAUDIBLE] object, you want
to have objects in the back, and explode them, and simulate them very quickly, that's a nice
tool to incorporate into your workflow.
All right. So let's take a look at the basic of rigid body simulations. So right now, in
this scene, we don't have any animation. Nothing's happening. And we want to create some animation
for the crates here using rigid body simulation techniques. So rigid bodies, if I right click
in the menu here, If I go in mass effects, this is a toolbar that you would be needing.
Also, we have a dialogue here, the max effects toolbar, the max effects tool dialogue. It's
good to have it handy, so what I'll do is, I'll just docket to the left here, so that
we can have it when we need it. So those are the tools that we need to start to do rigid
body simulation.
The second thing, I'm just going to select all the crates that are here, and I'm going
to tell the computer or mass effects that those should be simulated as dynamic rigid
bodies. So I'm going to click and hold that button, and just make it so I set all of them
as dynamic rigid bodies. So all of this will be done, and you'll see that they all will
receive the modifier called mass effects rigid body, and it will define their properties.
I'm going to select them all again. If you don't want to edit in the modifier, you can
also use the dialogue here, and if you go in Edit, you're able to edit the properties
of multiple objects at the same time. So when you have hundreds or thousands of objects
to edit at the same time, this becomes very handy.
So I'll make all of these cardboard, and we are going to simulate with the convex mesh,
because those are all faces and pieces of wood, so they don't have any concave area
or anything super fancy about them. So once this is done, we've defined the basics. And
so if I just liked everything, and then simulate, so that's actually simulating it, you'll see
that they're going to kind of fall through the ground, and nothing much is happening.
So what I want to do here is, I want to-- the boxes, I want them to interact with their
environment. So I'm going to select here all of the objects that are surrounding the crates,
and I'm going to set them as static rigid bodies. And static rigid bodies are not animated,
but they will be considered as rigid bodies in this simulation as well. I'm going to make
all of these concrete, because they're all kind of concrete. And you'll see that here
the mesh type is set to original. There's a difference between-- if I select this one
here, and I select convex, you'll see that it's going to create that cage around, and
that cage is the simulation mesh. Because we've got holes into that mesh and carved
areas here, we cannot simulate with the convex as a proxy, because we're not going to get
any results out of that. So that's why it's important to leave it to original when we
have these carved and convex areas here that we need to take into consideration.
So once this ready to go, if I just simulate again-- so this is the simulation button--
you'll see that this is exploding, and it's falling on the ground. Now it's working fine
because I have practiced a bit before, and the settings were remembered, but the idea
here is the collision overlap, sometimes it's set to a bit of a higher value. Let's say
that it's set to one feet. If I press Play here, or simulate it, you'll see that they
are going to go through the ground, because the collision overlap is too big, and they
are not considered to enter in collision with anything here. So that's why it's important--
I'm just going to say zero here, and 0.5, something very small. If you make it like
zero, it's not going to work very well. So I'm just going to say, simulate again, and
you'll see that those pieces are falling apart. And you don't see that explosion kind of effect, because
now the tolerances a bit smaller or a bit bigger. So that's kind of the idea. If you
play with the tolerance, you'll either have a bigger explosion effect, or they're just
going to fall through.
But for the explosion, you want to control the effect, and how they've project, and in
the direction they're going to project, and at what time those object will explode. Right
now, it's a bit boring. They just fall apart. We want to have a bit of energy into that.
So what I've done here is I've created spheres, and if I just scrub true-- and I'm just going
to go a bit closer so we can see here-- if I just scrub true, you'll see that in the
animation, I've got spheres that are just coming from inside of the box there, and push
out in very short amount of frames. So I think it's a four-frame animation. So because we've
got this very quick animation of those spheres, we're going to have them push, and create
the explosion type of animation movement.
So for that to happen, I'm going to select all of these explosion spheres. As they are
selected, I'm going to tell mass effects that those are kinematic rigid bodies, which means
that they are going to be simulated, but they are going to be animated by 3DS Max-- so by
the regular 3DS Max animation system. If I take a look at the properties for those spheres,
they're going to simulate with the convex mesh, which is good. And the preset here,
I'm going to set it to rubber. The reason is, I want them to be very bouncy when they're
going to push the cardboard or the pieces of wood. So I'm going to rewind this here,
and simulate, and we're going to get that explosion type of effect where they actually
are projected a bit more.
So if you want to enhance the dramatic effect of your scene, what I've done here is I've
created a bit more spheres, so you've got a bit more of them there. I'm going to select
all of them, and I'm going to make them all kinematic rigid bodies, and I'm going to rewind
here, and reset the simulation, and just simulate again. And we're going to get a bit more movement
into that. And you see that some of them are kind of delayed there. They become a bit after,
so if you just scrub through the animation, you see there's a bit of delay. The second
here are kind of delayed. So to avoid those crates to start to fall apart right at the
beginning, what I can do is I'm just going to select the crates that I would call delays.
So I've created the name selection set here. And what I'll do is, for these guys, instead
of making them dynamic, I'll say, you are going to be kinematic until frame, and we're
just going to go where that sphere is coming into. So it's about frame seven. So we're
going to make them kinematic until frame seven, which means that they're not going to be set
as dynamic before frame seven. So what's going to happen now is that, if I rewind the animation
and reset the simulation, you'll see that we'll get some delays there into the second.
So it gives you a bit more randomness into this simulation. So when you've got your the
simulation-- this is the realtime preview of your simulation. It's to give you a good
idea of how it's going to look like in the end. If you want to bake it, and make it part
of your animation system-- because right now, we don't have that simulation inside of 3DS
Max. It's only in the mass effects environment, which is a dynamic simulation environment.
I'm going to go in Tools here, and I'll say bake all, and it's going to go through the
animation, and it's going to create key frames into the Max animation channels, so that it
can be part of your regular animation.
And when it's done, you can even get rid of mass effects toolbar. You don't need that
anymore, because now it's a 3DS Max animation channel. So if I just press Play here, you'll
get the animation. And of course, it looks better if you don't have the sphere, so I'm
just going to hide the spheres, and this is the explosion that we get for that.
All right. Let's take a look at soft bodies. And soft bodies are objects that deform during
the animation, during the simulation. And we've got a typical example here. We've got
an oil barrel, and we'd like to explode it. So what I've got here inside again, is a sphere,
and that's sphere's just going to create that explosion kind of effect. So we're going to
delete that sphere or hide it in the end, but that's going to be our pressure pushing
out to create the explosion effect. We've got the debris or the fragments, so we've
got different pieces of this geometry. And you see that they've kind of tessellated.
And it's important because if we want to do a soft body simulation, we need those vertices
to store the animation, and if it's not correctly subdivided or subdivided a lot, we're not
going to get a lot of transformation out of those.
So if you want to do a soft body simulation, I'll select all of the objects that I want
to bring into the simulation. So those will be all the barrel fragments. I want to explode
with that sphere, so I'm going to bring it into the simulation, and I want the ground
here to be a collision object, so I'll bring it as well. So I've selected all of these
object, and I'm going to apply the cloth modifier to those objects. So I'll use the cloth modifier
with different cloth properties to get that look that I want for soft bodies.
So right now, the cloth modifier has been added. I'm going to go into the object properties,
and I need to define what they're going to be doing inside of the simulation. So all
of these barrel A_blah, blah, blah-- those will be the fragments of barrel A, and I'll
turn them into cloth object. And I want to define a very high setting. So if you do a
cloth simulation, those values here will probably vary between zero and 100. But since we want
to do a soft body kind of look, we want them to deform but have some sort of resistance.
I'll make those values quite high compared to cloth simulation. So 0.5 here is the resistance
level, and we'll make it to 150 here, compress here again. And those are resistance values.
So 150. And the plasticity here will make it at 50%. So now we've got those properties
done for kind of half range. And if I go to the bridge base and the explosion sphere,
I want those to be collision object. I don't want them to have too much depth-- I'll say
0.1, and the offset here is set to zero. We want them to be simulated on their vertices
with no kind of offset between the vertex and where it's going to be stimulated. So
here we go. OK. And we've got our setup. If I rewind this, I need to have at least one
object selected, because I need to have access to the cloth modifier to run the simulation.
And here's the simulate button. I'm going to press simulate, and you'll see this going
to start to give us some warning, that it's increasing the step size and all of that,
because we've got some high velocity condition. But that's fine. It's always automatically
adjusted.
And we're going to simulate on a few frames. You see that it's a bit longer to simulate
than rigid bodies, because it has to simulate the resistance for every vertex and every
phase, so it's a bit more of a complex simulation than the one that we did for rigid bodies.
So I'm going to cancel it for now, and just scrub through what we have so far. If I just
press Play, see, this is what we have, and we're stopped there. So since I knew that
it was going to take some time, I've prepared-- kind of put it in the oven and bring it back--
so we've got the explosion here as a soft body, and we get the fragments falling on
the ground.
But you see here, what's happening is that it explodes well, but as it falls on the ground,
it starts to flatten out because it doesn't have enough resistance to resist the change
of shape. So what we would like to do is that after it explode, after it has been twisted
by the heat of the explosion, we'd like those to have a bit more stronger resistance so
that they kind of stay twisted when they fall on the ground. So for that what I'll do is
that I'm currently at frame-- I'm going to select the ground here-- I'm currently at
frame nine, so I'm just going to truncate the simulation here. So you see that we only
have 10 simulated frames, so it's just going to stop there, but that's fine. And I'm going
to go the object properties, and I'm going to change-- and this is barrel B, because,
like I said, I've kind of simulated it before. So it's not barrel A. So I'm going to select
barrel B, and instead of having the basic simulation settings here, I'm going to load
the rigid body simulation setting, and those values are extremely-- 2,000. And if you still
see some resistance, or you have very dense object, and they kind of collapse on themselves,
don't hesitate to bring this to 10,000 or 20,000 values, if you want to. So the higher
those values are, the more rigid your bodies will be. So for these type of objects and
the size that they have, 2,000 was fine. So I'll just say OK. And from there, I'll say
simulate again, and you'll see that those object, as they fall on the ground, they will
tend to kind of try to keep their shape rather than flattening out. Of course, takes a bit
of time, so I've prepared that. So rigid body done. We'll get that here. So as it explodes,
and then as it falls on the ground, you see that it doesn't flatten out. It stays with
that shape here, without flattening too much. So that gives you a better effect of the rigid
bodies falling, kind of soft bodies transforming into rigid bodies throughout this simulations.
So we can change those settings during animation to get the effect that you want.
Okay, so we're going to take rigid bodies and soft body simulation a bit further by
adding some constraints in there. And with constraints, we can do some very interesting
effects. So what I've got here is a bridge collapsing, and it's just collapsing. We've
got some small debris there, but the rest is kind of big plates of concrete there. And
as this one here, we're going to focus on this one. We're going to isolate it. When
it hits the ground, I'd like it to break into smaller debris and continues its animation.
In order to do that, I need, again, to create the debris. So what I've done is I've created
those debris separately. And those debris are here. So we have the main concrete piece,
the big piece that is animated, and those fragments there are adjusting. They're not
animated yet. So in order to kind of animate them with mass effects and simulate them as
rigid bodies, we would like them to act as one at the beginning of the animation. And
when the concrete block hits the ground, as it hits it, we want them to start separately
as the object is cracking.
So rewind to frame zero here. I'm going to select all of these fragments, and I'm going
to link them to the main piece, which is here. And when it's linked, you see that we've got
exactly the same animation. Those fragments are following the big piece. We simulated
the big piece, and now the fragments are just following the parent. So I'm going to hide
the parent. I don't need it anymore now that we're linked to it. So we're just going to
focus on the fragments there. And those fragments, I would like them to be staying as one until
around here, around frame 60. What I'll do is I'll make sure that they're selected. I'm
going to go in mass effects toolbar. I'm going to say those are kinematic rigid bodies, but
I want them to be kinematic rigid bodies until that frame here. So basically it means that
until frame 60, they will be kinematic, and right after frame 60, they are going to become
dynamic, and they're going to be simulated in mass effects. So if I want that to work,
I'm just going to make them concrete. And you see that there's a lot of enter penetration
here, so we don't want to simulate with a convex mesh. We want to simulate with the
original mesh so that we have a better simulation.
Also, we need to look at the world. The world collision overlap is kind of big here, so
I'm going to set it 0.5. So that's about six inches. Again, it's a trial and error. You
need to try with it to get the effect. If the collision overlap is too big, objects
will start to interpenetrate. And if it's too small, it's just going to break apart,
and kind of break the simulation. So you have to play with those numbers until you get the
right value. So six inches here is good for me.
So now that I've got that, I can go here and say simulate. And you'll see that for the
first frames, it's just going to stay there. And as it hits frame 60, it's going to start
to fall down. And when it hits frame 60, they're going to start to be simulated as separate
object. So we have the effect that we want. I'm going to rewind all of this.
I'm going to select these fragments here, and say bake selected, and it's going to create
the final baked animation. The reason why I want to bake this now and not leave it in
mass effects is, I've got other simulations to do in that scene, and I don't want those
objects to load in mass effects all the time. So I'm going to bake them, and then I'm going
to remove the rigid body modifier out of them so they're not part of mass effects after
that. So to do that, keep them selected, right click, and say convert to editable poly. So
now they're all editable poly, and we're good to go. So now we have our simulation, and
we have the effect that we want.
And if we play all of this together, just to have a look, we'll see that we got that.
It's falling as one piece like the others, and then as it hits the ground, it breaks
into smaller pieces, and we get the really good effect out of that. And if I take a look
at any of those, you'll see that because we collapsed them to editable poly, we don't
have the modifier there on the stack anymore.
So I can move on to the second section of this constraint. I want to talk about constraining
with the constraints in mass effects. So right now, what we have here, we've got those tubes.
I'm going to set them as dynamic rigid bodies. And I will make them dynamic. That's good.
I will make them steel. They're kind of tubes that hold the wires beside the bridge. So
we'll see the full effect at the end. And we want to simulate with a convex mesh. That's
fine. And the world here, we're going to leave it to six inches. That's good. So if I simulate
this, we're going to get those objects falling on the ground. But you'll see that here they're
all individual objects. They're not attached to each other, and if they are supposed to
be attached, the effect is kind of lost. So if I want them to be attached to each other,
what I need to do is I need to select the object two by two, and I select the child
first and the parent second, and then I go here, and I choose one of those constraints.
So if I want them to be able to rotate in pretty much all direction, I'll create a universal
constraint, and the universal constraint gives me that level of freedom. I can adjust that
constraint, rotate it, and place it the way that I want, and then I can adjust the limit
angle. So do I want to make it bigger or smaller? But in this case here, I'll just make it free
and free, so they can rotate in all directions. And I'll do the same here with this one. I'll
grab the child here and the parent. I'll create a constraint, and I'll make it free and free.
Same idea. I'll do the same at the bottom here, grab this one here and this one. I'll
make those constrained to each other like that, and make it free and free. And the same
thing here-- grab this one and this one, and make them constrained to each other, like
so, and we're going to make them free and free. So now we have a constraint system.
So if we simulate again, you'll see that they are attached to each other. You'll see they're
going to fall down, and as they are falling down, they're going to stay attached to each
other. So we're good with that. I'm going to select all of this, and say bake. I'm going
to bake the selected. So the reason why I'm baking this is that I want to attach some
soft bodies to those, so soft bodies object simulated as soft bodies. So we need to bake
to have the animation inside of the 3DS Max animation system. So we don't want to leave
that into mass effects, which is only in charge of rigid bodies.
So we get that done. I can grab those constraint. I don't need them anymore. So I'll just select
all of them, and delete them. And we'll do the same as we did before. I'll just collapse
all of those to editable poly, and we're going to get that animation correct here. So we've
got that animation, and it's falling like that, and it's still constrained to each other.
So that's good. We don't need the rigid body simulation anymore. Now we can go into soft
bodies simulation, and I'll bring in wires, and those wires should be simulated as soft
bodies. But I want the top of the wire to be attached to this pole here, and the bottom
of the wire to be attached to this pole over there. In order to do that, I'm just going
to select all of these, because I want them to be included in simulation. And actually,
I just need those to be included in the simulation. So I'll go here and I'll say, cloth object,
and if I go into the cloth properties, those two here, the suspension tubes, I want them
to be collision object, very small depth here, and the offset to zero, so they're attached
to each other. And the line here, which is a cloth object, I will load kind of a full
soft body situation, with 300, 300, 300, and the plasticity of 100. It's kind of the most
rigid soft body, if you want. So it's close to being a rigid body. So I'm going to set
it to that, and OK.
And if I do simulate now, what we're going to get is that those cloth object will just
fall down, and they will not be attached to the tubes here. So what I'll do is, I'll grab
this one. I'll go in the cloth modifier, go in groups, and I'll grab the top vertices.
I'll make a group out of those. And I will use soft selection to have a soft transition
from the effect that I'm going to give it to and the simulated other. So I was just
going to go and bring it up like that, something like a smooth transition, like so. And then
we go here to top, and I'll say I want those vertices to be constrained to that surface.
So we're done, constraint to surface.
I'll grab those were disease at the bottom here, something like that, grab at the bottom.
I'll make a group of those, and I'll go at the bottom again to use a soft selection.
Not too much of a high value, just about like that. And then we're going to go back at the
top here, and we are going to make those constrained to a surface, this one here. And I can even
go and say, well, I want to grab these vertices here, and I want to make them as a tier. So
those points here will be terrible. It will be possible to tear them as the simulation
happens. So we've got our settings done. If I hit simulate, you'll see that the rigid
bodies have already been simulated, so they're going to keep their rigid body simulation.
They're going to fall down. And as they are falling down, you'll see that now those wires
that are soft bodies will be simulated, and they're going to be attached to that, like
so. And they're going to start to collapse on each other, and like so. So again, soft
body simulation can be a bit long, so now what we have is something like that. And I've
done the final simulation here with a little bit more of a dramatic effect with the tubes.
And it looks like, if I just scrub true, we have the-- some of those wires are tearing
here, they're breaking apart. I'd forgot to enable the cloth modifier on this one to here,
so we got the effect here of those bridge structure collapsing down, and bringing the
wires with them. So these nice soft body simulation adds a lot of detail to simulation. And that's
by constraining some of the part of the soft body simulation to rigid body objects.
So when we have particles, we have to simulate them using particle flow operators. So we've
seen how we've set up this particle setup here, so I'm just going to bring up the particle
view. And I'm going to maximize this here so we can see, something like that. And here
we go. So we have our particles. We won't animate them. Right now, we don't have any
animation, so it's just if I scrub, nothing happens. When you want to start animating
particles, it's always good to reduce the amount here. Let's say 250. So we have a bit
less, but we'll will be able to have a bit more interactivity inside of the viewpoint.
And when we're happy with the effect, we can crank up the amount in the end. So there's
no operator in there that animates the particles. So if I go here, and I take a speed operator,
and drag it in, so we can set it up to random 3D. The speed is very high at the beginning,
so it's going to go in all directions very, very fast, so it's not exactly what we want.
So I'll reduce the speed here, and I'll make it maybe 50, and we want to have variations
so they don't all go at the same speed. So maybe a variation of 20, 25. If I press Play
here-- let's zoom out so we can see what's happenings-- so something like that. We're
going to get the particles going in all directions. So that's pretty good for the speed of the
explosion. The problem now is that as they are simulated, the speed is constant, so they're
going to go forever in the same direction. So we'd like them to slow down, as they are
being affected by the air resistance. So to do that, we go into the space warp, and we
go to the forces. One of them is called drag, so I'm going to put a drag force in here,
and I'm going to drag in an operator called force, and I'm going to bring into the event.
And that force, I'm going to pick the drag force. So the drag here is now going to affect
the particle. So if I just press Play, you'll see that they're going to slow down as time
evolve. If I just exaggerate this effect, maybe 2,000% of influence, what we're going
to get is the explosion, and then they just stop there. So it's kind of a matrix kind
of effect where the time stops, but that's what we want. We want them to kind of lose
their momentum as they go away from the original explosion region.
Now we want them to be affected by gravity. So I'm going to add a gravity force, and I'm
going to bring in another operator, the force operator, and I'm going to add the gravity.
The gravity, 1,000%, is very, very high, so it's going to go down too fast. So I'm going
to make it maybe 50% here, and press Play, and you see that now they're going to fall
down. The motion is good, so we got the motion of the explosion, and then they start to fall
down. That's perfect, but after the motion, we need the particles to interact with their
environments. We need them to, when they hit those surrounding objects, we want them to
bounce. In order to do that, we need to go and grab a deflector, and I'm going to use
a U deflector. The U deflector allows you to pick any object in the scene and turn it
into a deflector. So I'm going to go to the modifier stack here, and I'll pick that bridge
structure, that bridge base. And this is now the deflector. So if I go into my event, I
can load in a collision operator, drag it in, and add that deflector here as the main
deflector. And you see that if the particles hit that deflector, they're just going to
bounce there. So if I just press Play, you'll see that they're going to start to bounce
there, and they're going to bounce forever, because you see that the balance effect of
the deflector is set to one, so they never lose energy. So I'm going to set it to 0.3
or a lower value, and this bridge structure here is kind of slanted in one direction.
It's not perfectly straight. So if we don't set any friction, they're going to slide forever.
So I'm going to make maybe-- let's say 200%, so that we can get the full friction, so they're
not going to slide at all. So if I go a bit closer now, what we're going to get is something
like that. They're going to explode, and as they fall on the ground here-- and maybe we
want them to bounce a little bit more, maybe 0.6, something like that, and they're going
to bounce a little bit more, and then they're going to start to stay there.
So that's kind of the idea for simulating. So we've seen that we've got the speed operator
that allows you to set them in motion. Then they're affected by force. And when they enter
in collision with objects surrounding them, you just set the collision to be bouncing.
If I want to have more, let's go back to-- we had 2,500. So if I just press Play now,
it's going to be a bit slower, but we're going to get the effect of the window breaking and
falling onto this geomtry there. So that's how you can do the basic particle simulation
for explosions.
When we get rigid body simulations out of mass effects, when we bake the simulation,
we get a key frame per frame, and it's kind of hard to make some adjustments. So when
the results get there, sometimes you want the rocks to fall further, to fall faster.
You don't get exactly the speed that you want, and there's always some little adjustments
to do on those animation results. So we're going to take a look at how we can do that.
So we have an animation here. It's this here. We have the road kind of jumping in the air,
and then the concrete here's falling down. So the road is obviously jumping way too high,
so we'd like to fix that. So we'll take a look at three techniques that we can use to
adjust this animation.
So you've got the rows here. They are going way too high, so we'd like to reduce the amount
of height for that. But if you look at all of these objects, you see that there's a key
frame per frame. So I cannot go in auto key mode and fix that. So the way to do this,
I'm going to select all of the object, and I'm going to enable animation layers. Animation
layers allows you to have multiple layers of animation, and do offsets on higher level
layers. So I'm going to enable the layers for these objects. I turned off scale here,
because I'm not going to animate the scale. I'm only going to focus on position and rotation.
And now we have the base layer, which is the base animation, and I'm going to add a new
animation layer, and I'm going to use the default controller type. I'm not going to
duplicate. And say OK. So now we have two layers. We've got the base and animation layer
number one. That's going to be our tweak layer for animation. And you see here, even if we
still have an animation, there's no key frames anymore, because that layer here is virgin
of animation, I would say.
So I can go in auto key mode, and then I can scrub in until where we get the peak level
here for our animation. I'm going to zoom out. And then since I'm in auto key mode,
it's going to record all of the modifications that I'm making. So I'm just going to bring
that down a little bit. This one, I'm going to bring it down as well. And I'm just visually
placing the animation objects, where I would like them to be at this specific frame. So
I'm just going to bring that back in. And visually, as a whole, it's going to still
work pretty well, because we still have the animation, and the speed, and all of that.
So if I rewind this now, you'll see that we get the animation, but it's a little bit more
confined into that space. And in the end, I'm just going to turn on auto key again.
This one is a bit too high. This one is a bit high as well. And we can make all these
tweaks.
And in the end, the overall effect is pretty much the same. We get a very nice visual.
We got some interpenetration here and there, but that's something we can adjust if we want
to. But in the overall effect, it works. So that's using the animation layer to fix the
position rotation and the transformation of the objects once the animations has been baked.
The other thing that we're going to take a look at here is, we've got the bridge here,
and it's falling on the ground like so. And let's say that it's falling a bit too fast
on the ground, and we would like to slow down the animation of this concrete piece here.
So here's how we can do this very quickly. I'm going to select all of these objects here.
You see that we see all of those key frames, and underneath here, we've got this bar called
the selection range. And the reason why we see this is, I'm going to right click in the
animation timer, configure, and you see that the show animation selection range is on.
By default, it's off when you install Mac, so it's not visible. So if I go back to configure
and enable it, we'll see the selection range. And that selection range allows us to move
key frames. So what I'll do here is, I'll make the time a bit longer, so that we can
extend the time, and I'm going to select all of these key frames, and I'm going to grab
the handle here on the right, and I'm just going to stretch it to 200. So now we have
an animation that takes twice the time to execute, and I'm going to go back here to
see only 100 frames of that. And if I press Play, you'll see that it's going to be much
slower, giving it a bit more sense of weight, a very, very strong sense of weight with that.
So if you don't have the timing that you want for animation, that's what you can use to
slow down animation.
Another technique that you can use to slow down animation is to use the motion mixer.
So what you need to do is, we have this animation here, and if we want to start to play with
the timing, I'm going to select all of those, go in animation, and I'm going to save the
animation. Going to override this file here, so an XAF file, and yes, that's fine. So it's
going to save the animation, the transformation, and pretty much all of the animation that
is related to these objects that are currently selected into an animation clip. So I can
go into the graph editor, enable the motion mixer. Right now, there's no track, so there's
no track group being added. So I'm going to grab, create this. All of these objects are
selected. So I'm going to add that. And now we have a track group for all of these object.
Now I can go here and say, load a clip from file. And I'm going to load that file, load
motion. The motion mixer can be used to blend animation, mix animation, so you can create
transition clips, or transition from one click to the other, and things like that. But in
our case here, we want to adjust the timing. so I'm going to enable the time warps. I'm
going to grab this clip here, and I'm going to add a time warp to it. And you see that
it draws a line. It allows me to add some markers onto this. And those markers, I can
grab the top part, and I can start to speed up certain areas. So you can see that if I
just stretch here, it's going to be very fast here, and then it's going to slow down, and
then it's going to be very fast at the end. If I just press Play here, this is what you
get. So very slow, and back there at the end. If I want to reset back to the original, just
go back here or something like that, just reset back here, and it's going to snap, something
like that, and we still have exactly the same clip, like so. So this is how you can adjust
the timing and be very precise about the timing of your animation, and tweak certain areas
using that motion clip.
In this video, we're going to take a look at how we can add some details in an explosion
with the particle flow. And what we have now is something we've played with a bit before,
is rigid body simulation for an explosion. And this crate here, it explodes pretty well,
but if it's a real crate, there's probably something in there, so we'd like to have that
content to explode as well. So you can add pretty much any type of content that you want,
put it as a rigid body, and explode it as well. But what I mean by details is those
little fine small things that would explode if this thing would explode. So nails maybe,
screws, if it's rock or concrete, maybe there would be some debris, some very fine raw debris.
And in this case here, what we're going to do is, we have some Styrofoam here. I've modeled
a small Styrofoam peanut. And you place them into those shipping crates so that it protects
the electronic equipment or something that's fragile. So that's kind of the idea. We would
like that to be filled with that kind of stuff. So I already set up the particle flow system
with operators that we already know about from previous examples. And when we have here
is just the position. They're based on the icon. We have a speed. We have a rotation.
We have a shape instance. Right now, it's set to none, but I'm going to grab immediately
the Styrofoam here. So we're going to get that shape. I'm going to adjust the size here
so it's not that big, and not too much variation, because most of the time, they're pretty much
exactly the same size, so we're just going to make very few, very small variation for
that. So 20%, something like that would be good. Maybe a bit smaller, something like
that. 15 is good.
Okay, so we have a force. We have a drag. We have a gravity. We've talked about that
before in the simulation section. And what we have now is the explosion. The explosion
is fast, and it's not contained within that box. So the first thing we need to do, after
we know the shape of those particles, is to define how they're going to stand at the beginning,
and then how they can expand. So if I go to the position, they're placed on the icon,
but I can switch that back here, and make the icon-- if I grab at the top here, or if
I select the icon in the viewport-- same idea-- you'll see that this icon is now set to a
rectangle. So I'm going to set it to a box, and I'm going to reduce the size of that box
so that it fits within the crate. And of course, you could emit from an object. If it's a more
complex shape, you can emit from an object like we've seen before. For now, since it's
a square, it's kind of easy to do that kind of shape. I use the icon which is better,
and you don't have to model a very complex shape, because what we're doing now is we're
adding details. So the icon is perfectly fine to emit those particles to begin with.
Now if we explode this, the particles are leaving way too fast. What I can do is, as
I go to a frame that is kind of right after the explosion, where the create explosion
debris are in space, and they give me a good idea of how the speed of this explosion happens,
then I can go to the speed operator, and reduce that back to-- I'm going to bring it back
to the view here, so we can see. I think it'd be better. So I'm going to increase the speed
here. And right now, it's set to random 3D. I would like them to explode up, so I'm going
to switch that to along icon arrow. Right now, the arrow is pointing down, so I'm going
to set it to reverse, and we're going to be able to define that speed. So the middle of
the explosion is about here, and I'm going to add some variation to expand so that they're
not all at the same speed. So it's going to expand with the expansion of the box there.
And I'm going to put some divergence so that it expands also vertically.
So we tried to stay within the explosion, so the particles are not going faster than
the actual box. And then what we've got is something that looks pretty much the same.
You can speed up a little bit more, and maybe add some more variations, maybe some divergence
a little bit more. So you want to get the same type of speed, the same type of effect
of these things, so they kind of feel that they're all going at the same speed. But of
course, these here are a bit lighter, so they're going to probably stay in the air a bit longer.
So that's fine if they explode a bit higher like that. They're all kind of keeping their
own rotation. So what I'll do here is I'll add a spin operator below the speed. So the
spin allows those particles to spin as well. Right now, they all spin at the same rate,
so I'm going to add maybe 150 degrees of spinning variation, so that they don't rotate all at
the same speed.
So we've got that pretty good, that that's not a lot of those, so we just place it to
200 for interactivity. We'll place it to something like 2,000, and now what we're going to get
is something that's a bit more believable, and we get a nice explosion of all of these
debris there, all of these Styrofoam peanuts. I think that's all they call them. And you
get very nice details into this explosion. So that's the kind of stuff that you can do
with particle flow, to add details of objects that could be part of an explosion, that would
add a bit more chaos and realism to the explosion.
Okay, now we're going to take a look at how we can make particles break into smaller fragments
to add a lot of details into a scene. So we've got those windows here that are hitting the
ground, and now they're just bouncing, which is not that realistic. So if you've got particles,
you can have a lot of debris and a lot of small fragments into a scene. So it's very
easy to multiply the amount of fragments, and that adds a lot of details to a scene.
So what do we have now for the particle system is just, if we go to particle view, bring
this into the environment here, what we have now-- I'm going to minimize this-- so what
we have this is just the particle bouncing, because we've set them up with the collision
operator here. So what we can do now is we can go and replace the collision operator
here by a collision spawn, which gives us a very similar behavior by default, so I'm
going to add the deflector here as the deflector. What we're going to get is those particle
bouncing, and they're going to go through after, just because we're spawning on first
collision, and we are actually deleting the parent, but we're creating new particles here
by offspringing one particle. So visually, it's the same result, but after that, they
go through. They don't bounce forever. I could say spawn on each collision, but that would
give us an effect that we don't want, which would be just pretty much just continuing
like that forever. So we're going to just keep it on the first collision. We are going
to delete the parent, and I'm going to show you why in a few seconds.
So right now, they're bouncing. Now they're bouncing themselves. So I'm just going to
create a new event here, and I'm just to use the force operator. I'm just going to use
the shift key, and drag it out, so we can use exactly the same force operator. And I'm
going to connect that here. So we are creating a new event. This event is going to be independent
of this one here. So an editor of exactly the same operators into this one, including
the force, but now we have a new event where we can see what's going to happen with our
particles. Right now, they're set to be display the sticks, so we're just going to go back
into geometry, and I'm going to make them the same color, so kind of a grayish color
kind of thing. So we keep the same color through the whole animation.
So now you see that they are exploding, they're bouncing, but they're not actually exploding
or fragmenting as they hit the ground. So that's all happening in the collision spawn.
You see that, right now, it's off-springing only one particle, so that means that it's
creating only one particles. And the size of it, the speed and how it's being generated,
it's defined here. So the size factor here is set to 100%. So we're going to reduce that
to a smaller value. So you see that here. Maybe I'll set it to 25%, with a bit of variation,
so that they're all not exactly the same size. So now what we get is that as they bounce,
you see that they are smaller. But because they are 25% smaller, what we're doing is
that we're losing volume when those objects hit the ground. So it's not working very well.
So what we would like to do is to have more particles. So what I'll do here, so I'll go
and offspring, and I'll say if we have 24%, that means that we need four particles to
create exactly the same volume. So now what we have is that, as they hit the ground, the
parent is deleted, but each of the fragments there or the original particle generate four
new particles. But they are all kind of very aligned, so that's where we need to integrate
some variations of speed. So I could go here and say [INAUDIBLE] to speed maybe to 80%,
and add 20% of variation. So now you see that they are even then a bit more. You see that
now they're spreading a bit more in terms of speed. I can also define the direction
divergence, so they're going to splash more horizontally. The more liberty they have or
freedom they have in the divergence, the more they're going to splash. Now what's going
to happen is that they going to hit the ground, and you see that we're going to have those
new details there happening.
So on the second bounce, what I'd like to do is, I would like them to stop there. So
I can use either a regular collision operator. So if I just go here, say put a regular collision
operator, and we are going to capture this one. And instead of bouncing, we can just
say stop. So now what's going to happen is that they're going to bounce here, and then
they're going to stop there. So that's kind of the idea, or what I could do is turn off
speed, or another way of doing it is I can say bounce here if you collide, but I can
also put a speed operator, drag it in, and connect it here, and put the speed here to
zero, and now what's going to happen is that they're going to bounce once, and then the
second time, they're going to display as geometry. And again, a grayish color, so we can keep
the same color than at the beginning. And here we go, we got those particle stopping
there. So that's kind of the idea of cascading multiple events, to create those debris. And
of course, you can add a lot more if you want to. So if I go back to the collision spawn
here, and say I want to have 10 particles, and I want them to be about 1/10 of 100%,
you can have very small debris as they come in there. So again, very nice windows breaking.
So that's a way to add details using particle flow.
In this video, we're going to take a look at how we can add some smaller debris to the
faces of the objects that are fragmented in here. So as a concrete object fragments like
that, it's very rare that we get a very sharp cut. We're going to have some smaller rocks
there, or small debris that are going to be emitted from those areas. So that's what we're
going to do. I'm going to go here-- and just to show you before we go, I'm going to do
it on a few blocks so that you can see the effects, so we've got these blocks there that
are falling down. And if I select one of them, if I go into face selection mode, you'll see
that I've selected faces, and those are the faces that I'd like to attach rocks to it,
or smaller debris. I did the same for all of these, so if you look at the face selection
there, it's pretty much the same. And this one as well. You'll see that we have faces
selected there. So that's where I want the particles to be emitted from.
To do that, I'm going to go back to my particle view. I'll enable the particle events. Right
now, they are all emitting from the icon, the position icon, and they have a speed by
default. So what I'll do is I'll just delete that speed operator so that they're staying
there. They're not animated right at the beginning. And you that they're positioned on an icon,
so I'm going to switch that with position object. And I'm going to grab all of these
objects here, and they're called phase debris. So I'm just going to select the four of them.
And instead of emitting on the surface, I'm going to emit on selected faces. So you see
that now they're all emitted, and they're all going to follow. But the thing is that
they're not locked to the emitter, so I'm going to turn on here a lock on emitter, and
you'll see that they're going to follow those rocks. So now that they are emitted on those
faces, they are following the rock, now we want them to detach as the rocks are falling
down.
So what we can do is add an age test in here, and I've got a second event here where I just
created a gravity force. So I'm going to attach that to this, and the age text here, we're
going to say we want those particles to detach between frames zero and 50. So I'll say a
value here of 25, with a variation of 25. So they're going to start to slowly detach
from frame zero to frame 25. So now what we're going to get is that you see that they start
to be affected by the gravity here as they fall down. So we get those smaller debris.
And I'm just going to move this up, and we get this animation where those debris are
falling down. So it's a nice way to add some details from a fragmentation of objects like
this.
All right. Another way to a use particle flow to add even more details to a scene is to
use it to create smoke, dust, or things like that. So very, very fine details that will
be affected by the wind. So here, we have a wind force. We're going to use that a bit
later. So we're going to start back from where we were at the end of the previous example.
We've got those rock debris that are being emitted, and I'd like those to have a dust
trail as they travel here. So I'm going to go to particle view. Right now, we have our
event from the last example. And those debris are defined over here, or the smaller debris
are defined over here. So I can use the operator called the spawn operator, and I'm just going
to connect it on the other side here. Right now, it's set to spawn only once, but I'm
going to change that, and I'm going to say by travel distance. So as it's traveling through
space here, it's going to emit new particles. So now I've done that at frame 39. It's going
to generate all of those particles. Or go back to zero. And we're going to start playing
this here, and you see that it's spawning those particles.
Of course, we don't want to create new rocks. We want to create something different, so
that's why we're going to branch it out here. So I'm going to create a display operator.
I'm going to connect it to that, and we're just going to display as dots so that we can
see the effect of what we're going to do here. So as those particles are being emitted, you
see that they're kind of going towards-- they're going to keep being their same speed movement,
and it doesn't give us the effect of a trail. That's because in the spawn operator here,
they're set to keep the same exact speed. So I'm going to turn off-- or put the [INAUDIBLE]
here to zero. And what you're going to see here is that those smaller debris will start
to emit those particles. I don't want to create a perfect line like this, so we're going to
just-- just a little bit more of their speed, something like that. We're going to add some
variations in there, and also a bit of divergence so the trail is not perfect. So we're going
to get that effect there. So it goes like that, and now we've got a nice trail there.
You can spawn multiple times if you want to. Right now, we only have one spring. I can
make it two or three, so every step is going to emit more particles. We can have a nice
smokey effect there.
So now we have the trail, but the thing is that it's not affected by the wind, so we
want to have the dust kind of effect. This dust would be affected by the wind, so I'm
going to add in a force operator, drag it in there, and now I'm going to pick the force.
I'm going to add this force here, which is the wind-- very strong, 1,000, so let's start
with 20%, and just going to move that aside here. So just to play until we get the effect
of filling the frame-- something like maybe 84% will be good, and now we got these particles,
and they're being emitted, and they're being affected by the wind.
If you want to script a smoke kind of look, I'm just going to show you this here. I'm
going to go back to particle view. You can use something like a sphere. So if I go here,
and I use the shape operator, something like that, that shape here, I'm going to make it
a 20-sided sphere, and we're going to move that aside here. So you'll see that we're
going to emit spheres, and the display, we're going to show the geometry. So the spheres
are kind of that size. I want to have some variation, of course. So I'm going to scale
them to 100%, maybe a bit smaller, and add some variation there. So smaller there, so
we got some variation in the size of the particles. So now we got those spheres being emitted,
and each of those spheres can be replaced by a material, so if I just bring in a material
static-- here we go-- I can define the material for these, so I'm just going to bring it up
there, to update-- anyway, as it updates, I'm just going to open up the material editor.
You see that here, we've got a material, and the way that I've created the material is
very simple. In the opacity map here, I created a channel. And the opacity is based on the
fall-off, and the fall-off is based from the viewing direction perpendicular parallel.
So everything that faces away from the camera is kind of faded out. So the opacity is strong
in the center, and it fades out on the side, and inside here, I've put a noise map, and
the noise gives us this randomness pattern there. We got the update here, so what we
have now is material static. I'm just going to drag it in here, drag in there, make it
as an instance. And for some reason-- maybe it's because I'm recording-- I'm just going
to put it there. Here we go. So we got the material static, and now this material will
give us the effect of a smokey kind of mist with all of these spheres there.
One last thing I want to talk about with adding details to an explosion scene is to use fume
effects. Fume effects is kind of unavoidable if you're doing visual effects for movies,
or for explosion like this. And it's a very simple tool to use, and it gives outstanding
results. So it's a fluid fire and smoke simulator. And if you go into the primitives here, you'll
find the fume effects primitive. There's only one. It's called fume effects. And the way
it works is that you define a cage around your scene. It's defining where you want to
do the simulation. So it's kind of a container for where you want to do all of the simulations.
So, I'm going to place it around this cylinder here, and we want to make sure that we contain
the explosions. We have this explosion here, and we would like to create an explosion of
fire right in the middle to justify that those debris are going in those directions. So I'm
going to make sure that it's big enough to contain something like that, maybe a bit wider,
a bit like that, and we want the fire to be quite high, so I'm going to bring the height
of it as well, and the length here to be-- the width here to be a bit wider, and we've
got something that contains it. When they cross the ground, I don't really care, because
we assume that there's going to be a ground there, and they're going to go down like that.
So we want the explosion to be simulated in that area.
So to define where we want something in fire, we're going to go to the helpers. And again,
fume effects come with its own category of helpers. We're going to put a simple source.
Simple source is going to emit fire from that icon. I'm going to place it right in the middle
of that cylinder there. Going to rise it up a little bit. And I want that fire to be emitted
from within the cylinder, so I will reduce the diameter of this so that it's contained
pretty close to the inside of the cylinder.
So we're pretty much done with the setup. Now we're ready to run a simulation. So if
I click on the cage, that's where everything happens. We can show a preview. Right now,
nothing has been calculated, but that preview's a good indicator of how it's going to look
like when we're going to render. And we're going to bring up the fume effects UI. And
fume effects, if you look on the web for Alan McKay's videos, he has more than 30 hours
of videos on fume effects. So, of course, in five minutes, we cannot go through all
the fume effects. I want to show you the workflow, and then how you can tweak the fire, and the
smoke, and the look of it, and all that, I'm not going to cover that. Just to give you
an idea of how powerful it is, and then if you're interested, you can get it, and explore
it, and also look at Alan McKay's training videos on the web.
So I'm going to go into the objects and sources. I'm going to say the icon here will be the
source. And if I want to have an interaction with the rest of the barrel-- because if the
acid explodes, we want to have some influence-- I'm going to also go here and pick solid objects,
and those will be the barrel's fragments here that are there. So now these here will be
solid objects, so they will interfere with the fire, and the vorteces, and the simulation,
and all that. So I could simulate right away. So if you go in simulation mode, you'll have
your basic explosion like that, and the preview. So it's kind of nice, but we want to do a
few adjustments, and those assessments will be minimal. So if I go into the simulation
settings, you see that we've got some turbulence there, so I'm going to add a bit of turbulence,
maybe 0.5, something like that of turbulence, nd you can increase it to have a bit more
turbulence. And also, if I go to the source itself, right click on the source, you can
set up the temperature, just how much smoke, and how much fuel. So we don't really care
about the fuel, so we're going to leave it as so. The temperature here-- if I want to
do not a fire, an explosion, I want to have a burst of fire at the beginning. So what
I'll do here is I'll turn on auto key, and I'll say at frame zero, it's zero. So I want
that to be zero at zero. And as it starts to explode here, I'm going to bring it up
to 1,000, so it's very, very high temperature. Then I'm going to go a bit further here when
it's exploded, and I'm going to set it up back to maybe 999, so that we can record a
key frame, or 1,000. Here we go. And then we're going to start to fade out to zero here,
and we're going to have our animation.
So right now, what we have is that we go from zero to 1,000. Then we stay to 1,000, and
then we fade back down to zero. And now that preview is invalidated, because we haven't
ran the simulation yet. And we're going to do the same thing with the smoke. So at the
beginning, I'm going to say it's a zero smoke, and then it's going to start to go a bit higher.
So we add a value of two or three, something like that. As it explodes there, we're going
to keep it to a value of 2.9 or three to record the key frame, and then as it phased out here,
I'm going to set it to zero. So what we're going to get now is-- same idea. It's going
to go up, and then go back down to zero. So let's simulate that to get the effect. So
we're going to get that burst of explosion here at the beginning, and then we get the
smoke, and then it stops, and the smoke dissipates. So we get that explosion kind of effect. Also,
what we can do is that we can add objects being set on fire. So some of those metal
plates that are being kind of exploded, we want them to be on fire. In order to do that,
I'm going to go back to my helpers, and one of the helpers here is called an objects source.
I'm going to just put the helper in there, and if you go to the modifier stack, you can
now define which objects are going to be on fire. So I'm going to select these here, and
I've created a few of those fragments that are supposed to be on fire. So on fire, and
then I'll go back to my simulation, which is the cage itself. And we are going to add
that source. Go back here, and say I want to add that source. So now, that source is
at the bottom here, and we'll say the smoke here, the temperature set to maybe a bit higher,
maybe to 600, and we want those parts to be emitting a bit of smoke, so a smoke of three.
So we'll leave it constant throughout the animation. We want them to be on fire. Actually,
auto key, set it to zero at zero, and then as they explode, now we're going to set it
to probably 600-something. 600 was good of a simulation. It's not the full burst of explosion.
They're just on fire there, so it's going to keep it up like that. And same thing for
the smoke. I'm just going to turn it off at the beginning, and here, we're going to set
it to three so that they only emit smoke when they are exploded, on fire.
So I'm going to simulate again, and what you're going to see here is that in the preview,
you'll see that those objects are now on fire, and they're going to fly away, and we're going
to get some nice fire simulation. Of course, you could tweak the look, add the contrast,
add some lights, do some very nice effects with that smoke and fire, but that's not the
purpose of this demonstration. I just wanted to show you the simulation effect of it. So
what we have now, I'm just going to zoom out, and again, that preview window is very useful.
It's just an idea, it's just a preview. It's not as refined as the final rendering, but
it gives you an idea of how it's going to look like from the current point of view of
the camera.
Another thing that you can do with fume effects is I'm going to switch state here to go to
a second state, and that's actually my pillar that we've animated a bit before. And those
particles, I've left them attached to the selected faces there. So we've seen how to
do that previously. So what I'll do here is I'll create another fume effects simulation
cage, like that, make sure that it contains the whole thing. So I'm going to make it a
bit wider, something like that, and a bit higher. And what do we want to do with this
is, we want to-- those faces, as they break, we want them to emit smoke.
So what I'll do is, again, go into the helpers. And those are particles, so instead of using
an object source, I'm going to use a particle source. Just drag it in, and then grab particle
flow, and anything that's in particle flow will now be emitting smoke. And that's pretty
much the idea. If I go back to my cage, we are going to go to the modifier stack, and
bring up the UI here, show the preview, and all we want to do is bring in that particle
flow source. And you'll see that in the settings here, we don't really care about the temperature.
So we're going to set that temperature to zero, so there's no fire. And the smoke here
will put it a bit higher, a value of 10. So we're not going to have any fire. We're just
going to have some smoke emitting from those particles, from those faces.
And if we go into the simulation here, again, we're going to put some turbulence, maybe
turbulence a bit higher, of maybe 10 inches or something like that. And I'm going to simulate,
and you're going to see that we get the smoke here, being spread into the scene by those
selected faces. So it's a very nice way to have that kind of smoky effect and mist effect
inside of your scene when you have big explosions.
So fume effects, like I said, is extremely powerful. You can watch Alan McKay's DVDs
on the web. You can download them there. I think they're $60 or something like that.
But it's very affordable, and it gives you the full training on fume effects, which is
a lot of fun to play with.