Best approach for architectural destruction?

salimmatta

Hey guys,

Whats the best approach for architectural destruction scene modeling? should I do it manually? or better with a tool like pulldown it in Maya?

Regards,

sprunghunt

You need to give us more info. Is it for a game? what engine are you using? How big does the destruction need to be? is it going to be close to the player? do you need to be able to interact with the pieces afterwards? 

salimmatta

sprunghunt said:

You need to give us more info. Is it for a game? what engine are you using? How big does the destruction need to be? is it going to be close to the player? do you need to be able to interact with the pieces afterwards? 

my bad mate, well its for a game yes, and its unreal engine. Think about the environment art of gears of war, its unique and yet it have a very nice scenes of architectural destruction

musashidan

Are you talking about dynamic in-game destructibles or already destroyed meshes that you need to model?

You need to give people more info. Describe it detail what it is exactly you're wanting to do. Maybe link a few visual examples things you've tried yourself. Help people help you.

salimmatta

musashidan said:

Are you talking about dynamic in-game destructibles or already destroyed meshes that you need to model?

You need to give people more info. Describe it detail what it is exactly you're wanting to do. Maybe link a few visual examples things you've tried yourself. Help people help you.

Yes my bad sorry.
Well, already destructed, no dynamics so far. Think about a city in ruins, destruction, like fallout 4 etc etc

sprunghunt

salimmatta said:

sprunghunt said:

You need to give us more info. Is it for a game? what engine are you using? How big does the destruction need to be? is it going to be close to the player? do you need to be able to interact with the pieces afterwards? 

my bad mate, well its for a game yes, and its unreal engine. Think about the environment art of gears of war, its unique and yet it have a very nice scenes of architectural destruction

In a situation like that you would model it that way to start with. You don't need any unusual software. 

musashidan

I would use a mix of the 2. Rigid body sims are great for getting a natural and very fast pile of rubble set up. You can also use fracture tools to derive good base meshes for further sculpting. This will always be faster to set up and look much more believable than hand-placed destruction. Of course you can always tweak any parts by hand or delete them when the sim is baked.

Another method is to set up dynamic rigid body sims to smash things up. So you could have an animated(becomes dynamic as the collision occurs) sphere or whatever primitive smash holes in a wall or break off corners. The sim will leave a very natural result which can be the base mesh for sculpting. You can also dynamesh the main structure of fractured meshes as one and sculpt.

Another useful technique is to create a set of rocks or lumps of rough concrete and boolean them in interesting ways from your main remaining structures using Zbrush. Then get sculpting.

Of course you don't have to sculpt everything. You can also use tiling textures or substances.

Mark Dygert

Unreal does a decent job of creating real-time-friendly destructible meshes that work well with it's in-game physics system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCgCOZNVE9k


The procedural slicing is fun to play around with also.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnE7sYC4u5Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qSe7ItCnTM