Controlling when to Break Glue Constraints in Houdini
Download Houdini File: Destruction_Control_Breaking_Glue_Constraints.hiplc
In this video, I demonstrate how to use an animated force field geometry to produce a delay in the destruction of a fractured wall. This is a technique I used to produce some variation in the scene of the destruction of a fractured wall structure. The resulting visual effect has a huge hole that gets blasted through the wall and slowly destroys the rest of the wall pieces as the force field grows in its animation.
I also added some coloring to each fractured piece with the help of a custom attribute I made within the dopnet.
Playing around a Toon Shader and toonified a previous destruction clip:https://t.co/aBt3x9DY6F#Destruction #cgi #3dart #sidefx #render #dailyrender #3dartist #vfx #3d #gamedevelopment #indiedev #indiegame #3dmodeling #gametools #gameart #Houdini #Blender pic.twitter.com/QEcOqZl1dz
— Blue Bursting Bubble (@BubblePins) December 26, 2019
Toon Shader
For fun I applied a toon shader onto the fracturing wall in this HIP project file to experiment what it would look like and I was very pleased with the results. I didn’t use Houdini’s Mantra Toon Shader, instead I used a Toon Shader add-on I bought for Blender 2.8. It was a LOT faster compared to Mantra.
I was able to transfer the “distance” attribute from the Houdini simulation onto Blender and add a color ramp to colorize the fractured pieces from furtherest distance as green and closest pieces as red.
The inside and outside material slots also transferred nicely onto Blender without issues, which made it super easy to colorize the inside primitives to dark gray.
Side Project
In a previous side project I did before, I used the same technique I showed in this video to produce this short animation that I uploaded to my twitter. Most of the destruction force is produced by my invisible force field (it’s invisible the force field isn’t rendered) and I added the green mannequin punch animation later on.
The green mannequin is actually interacting with the dopnet as a static object with deforming object option turned on. This will the pieces will collide with the mannequin and the punch is connecting to the fractured wall with a bit of force as well.
3D Animations
Recently I’ve been interested in 3D animations with Blender and spent some time animating a simple mannequin character and was able to produce two simple motions. One punching animation and another jumping animation.
The animation itself isn’t that exciting, but I find when combining the mannequin animation with the destruction simulations in Houdini, it’s very rewarding! It comes together quite well and makes the destruction simulation look visually more interesting. After I clean up my animations, I may upload them onto this site for all to download.