fragmenting a mesh?

[Hirazi]

Don't know if this (still) works as it is quite old and I haven't tried it myself...
There's a shatter tool, called "Xsi Shatter v4" on www.motionblur.it

Helge Matthee (Softimage) showed a quite impressive looking attempt at a shatter tool implemented in ICE at the Softimage|NET/Area (http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-softimage/ice---interactive-creative-environment/object-fragmentation/) , but this hasn't been released (yet?)...

And another option, for walls, would be using Rigid Bodies and treating every single brick as a separate object to begin with...

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks for the links!

Helge's tool would really look like the solution, too bad he hasn't published it. Especially this video (http://217.160.138.15/helge/ice/ice_shatter_03.mov) as well as this (http://217.160.138.15/helge/ice/shatter_letter_01.mov) are pretty much exactly what I was looking for :) Well, at least it can be done.

I don't know if building the wall brick by brick would really work in practice. It might be too heavy to be used in a game as the effect would only be necessary when breaking the wall and even then only in a relatively small part of the wall. Of course, this would make it really easy, no scripting would be required to see which part of the wall is to be shattered :)

I started thinking also if this could be done using shaders. I mean if a real-time shader can deform a mesh, wouldn't it be possible also to break a mesh in pieces? Just a thought, I have never written shaders so far and don't really know much about them. Well, probably easier in ICE, when you know your way around it - *back to studies*

[Mic_Ma]

Do it in Houdini and import it?

[wannabeArtist]

Heh :D

I think I'll stick with the tools I have available.

[Mic_Ma]

Heh :D

I think I'll stick with the tools I have available.

Why not, it's free (apprentice version) and even if you don't know it, it's quite a bit faster than inventing your own new ICE tool. If anything you can dive into the shatter and break nodes, see how it's made and perhaps replicate in xsi. I think it may be possible to replicate them almost 1to1 in an ICE tree.

[wannabeArtist]

Hmm,

Perhaps it's worth a look. Although, I think importing would not work that easily - the free Apprentice does have a watermark. But as a learning experience it might be well worth the effort especially if it would give me a hint in how to do with ICE.

[Mic_Ma]

The watermark is only applied during rendering.

Save your mesh as an obj file in xsi. (fbx and collade are also possible to import but a bit tricky if you're new to it)

Once in Houdini put your mouse over the bottom right "network view". It should be there by default and called /obj.

Press tab and type "geometry". You get a geometry node and if you double click on it you get inside and see a file node. Point that to your obj file. Tab and type "shatter".

There you go, thats your shattered object. To see whats going on double click on that node and explore.

To export, put down another file node and set to write.

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks a lot! I will try it out :)

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