Maya 2009 - Physic - Explosion

sama.van

Hi Guy!


One more time I would really need your help on this point....

I have a broken props.

All parts are skinned into a the same mesh and then each parts has his own joint.

Well the challenge here is using physic and to simulate an explosion into Maya's view port.


Main difficult part to me is to find the right documentation or example then I can learn how physic works into Maya and what I am supposed to do for creating an explosion with 3D objects.

After that I am sure I can handle the next step.


Well, all documentations are welcome...


Thank you much guys for your help !!


sama.van

Ark

[ame]http://www.amazon.com/Maya-Studio-Projects-Todd-Palamar/dp/0470487763/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312276532&sr=8-1[/ame]

Thats a fairly good book on the subject for introductory stuff.

Then theres also Blastcode plugin for Maya, i believe this is what Valve used in L4D for the explosions of things like the Plane in Dead Air and the Gas Station in No Mercy.

sama.van

yeah but a 300$ plugin =_=.

There are a bunch of rigid body, and other gravity, vortex, etc,, things in maya...

Is there really no way to simulate an explosion with give 3D objects in a simple way with Maya?

All video on youtube are mainly done with particule.


Nobody here gave it a try before?


I done some test during the 2 past days, with passive and active rigid bodies, a gravity and a sphere in a middle of a box to make it fly.
But Computer is lagging crazy, and the effect is not really the waiting effect...

Dunno why the simulation is so slow... Maybe there is another way more light for memory to get the same effect?

Ark

Simulations are always gonna take an age, especially on complex explosions like your after. Things like sub-steps and collision hulls can be simplified to speed up the simulations, but then you loose accuracy.

One way i can think of is to use a force to expand the geometry outwards then turn them into rigid bodies.

Depends how complex you wanna get.

sama.van

This is for iphone...
Was supposed to use the optimized physic from Unity-ios engine, but finally choose to create an animation in Maya.

If really this take age I will do like I always done, building a simple hand made animation...

But wanted to improve production time...

I will keep going on my test and will update the thread if I success to get something better!

ivars

Can you show us what you have and what you want to achieve?

sama.van

Sure!

Then I have props and the broken version.

Well what I did so far is all part with an active rigid body, and the floor plus a big ball in the middle of the crate with a passive rigid body.
Finally a simple gravity node.
I tried high value on the "mass" attribute but that is not really change much thing.

The simulation works well if the object fall, everything fly once collision with the floor...
But if the box is already on the ground, to create an explosion is more difficult.


I would like the crate get broken slowly or explode.
Well if I success to do one of those 2 actions, I am sure to be able to do the other.

For now the problem are the parts do not really fly and the simulation is very slow..

ivars

Probably your pieces are intersecting at the start of the simulation. You could either move them apart slightly, or animate the collision attribute so that they have no collision the first few frames, until they have separated (if you're doing an explosion) but then you would need to use a field instead of a sphere to push them apart. Try a radial field in the center of the box.
Mass is just the relation between objects. I don't know what you wanted to achieve with a higher value, if your object appear too light, lower bounciness, increase friction and set some damping (or use a drag field).

Also, VERY important, make sure your playback settings are set to "play every frame".

fade1

i'm not a dynamic specialists, but this sounds like you need another force to simulate the explosion, like the radial field under dynamics/fields.

sama.van

I continue working on that thing...
Good progression so far and physic in Maya is awesome ^_^!!

Well, today I am experimenting a kind of glitch like the following picture once the animation baked O-o.

Does someone already got this kind of issue? That is only affect rotation attributes and it is very random... Sometime appears and sometime it's fine...

During this glitch, the object is flying alone in space, nothing collide with...

wailingmonkey

i *think* you could try the Euler filter (in the Graph Editor -> Curves -> Euler Filter)
on those curves (that went astray) and then re-bake...if you didn't want to edit each
keyframe back into place by hand.