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View Full Version : Simulating "steel nails"?

DragonSFX
04-22-2007, 07:11 PM
Hello everyone. i am relatively new to maya and have just did my first project using dynamics. It is a simple wooden structure that gets hit by a series of cannon balls and hence is destroyed. Now, my first attempt used gravity on everything, however the structure would begin to collapse as soon as the scene started to play (befoire being hit by the cannonballs). so, i removed gravity from everything except the cannon balls and now it works pretty well... however, without gravity on the structure it just explodes in all directions from inertia and also seems to be in slow-motion compared to how it would react in a real environment.

my question is this - if i parent all the individual pieces of lumber together to create a single structure i assume that it will cease to come apart when struck by the cannon balls... so, is there a simpler way to bind the individual pieces together so that they will still come apart under impact without having to create individual nails and manually insert them into all the boards?

you can see a short wip clip here:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/539288/scaffold_cannonball_work_in_progress/

thanks for any help you can give me.
dan1el
04-23-2007, 06:43 AM
couldn't you just animate the gravity's magnitude ? so that when the cannonbal hits the structure the magnitude goes up to 9.81 ?
DragonSFX
04-23-2007, 10:27 PM
yeah, i thought about just keying it in on que, but to be realistic i would have to key different parts of the structure at different times, which i guess isn't that bad... but it seems like there would be another way to bind the pieces together so that the gravity could exist simultaniously. so if each joint had a certain amount of weight then parts of the structure would stay together and other parts influenced more by the impact would come apart, like a real-world event. is there no shortcut?
Als
04-25-2007, 05:57 PM
Yes. You need to connect gravity field only after the rigid body moves.
You need small expression which will check velocity of all the objects in the scene every frame, and then if the velocity of that object is biger then 0, connect gravity field to this object.


Als
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04-25-2007, 05:57 PM
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