Hi,
I am just learning houdini. I have a small missile that will fly into a bridge and fracture it. I am at the point where the bridge breaks right after the impact but the bridge breaks in large chunks. Can anyone tell me how I can increase the number of parts when it breaks?
Thank you!
Would be good to know how you broke the geometry. Did you use the shelf tools? Or a simple setup with the voronoi fracture? Screenshots or scenefiles would help.
Cheers,
Simon
Well you really want the smaller pieces shattering around the point of impact.
What I would do is build the shatter network by hand. Create your geometry making sure there are quite a few surface divisions on the geometry. Add a colorSOP and colour it black (0,0,0 - RGB respectively). Next add a paintSOP and change the foreground colour to red (1,0,0 - RGB respecitvely) and paint around the point of impact. Now this is whyyou need the extra surface geometry so there are enough points to paint this colour.
Drop down a voronoi fractureSOP down and pipe the geometry into the first input. Now take another wire from your geometry and feed that into a scatterSOP. Change the scatter "force total count "to say 50 for a trial. Now inside the scatterSOP there is a checkbox thats says “Density Attribute”, click this on and delete the word “density” from the now accessable drop down, and change it to Cd for the colour attribute you painted in red on the geometry. Now the scatter will scatter those points anywhere with a value above zero, and as we painted red only, the scatter will happen only in the painted area’s.
Wire the output of this into the second input of the voronoi fractureSOP. Now it will shatter based on those points location. The force total count in the scatterSOP directly controls how many pieces are created for the shattering to happen.
Now use the shelf tools to set up the fractured object and build glue networks to your liking.
There are so many ways in getting smaller chunks. First one, have a look at the examples, look for voronoi fracture points. This node together with voronoi fracture will satisfy your starting needs. The way to glue chunks together is mainly straightforward but it also becomes a small science, specific in combination with other constraints and pointwrangle nodes to achieve i.e. real bending stuff.
Its a really large field so I reccomend to watch some videos on vimeo or you tube. Also the SFX lessons are fantastic. Have a look for Ari Danish, its the master instructor from SFX.
Also there are a lot comercial DVDs.
Its a really amazing theme if you know whats possible and how to realize your ideas.
But: Everything is possible :keenly:
cheers 