Mesh Destruction and Procedural Detail Creation

Waz

I am looking to find away to blow apart lots of space ships quickly and easily. Ideally selecting main elements, detaching them and then growing cables, metal frames, debris out of the chunks.

What would the quickest and easiest way of doing that with procedural UVs generated for the new bits?

Benjammin

Houdini - although it won't be quick and easy if you're new to it. 

poopipe

It won't be quick and easy even if you aren't new to it. 
90+% of people will get better results faster if they do it by hand (using prebuilt modules etc)

It only makes sense to develop an automated system for this sort of thing if you have a shit load of them to make or if you want to make the system for the fun of it 

okidoki

AFAIK destruction simulation is a very complex topic.. especially it also depends on the "media".. building, bridges, cars, aeroplanes, ships.. some of those "animations" just do look fake (that's maybe the reason why in VFX this is "covered" with plenty of dust or extremly heavy explosions and "motion blur" ).. so any spaceship also has to be built of different parts with different "material properties" like splinterable, easy tearable, badly bend, indestructable ..so but pulled out of something.. even then something might also bend or spliter after i was detached from the hull. etc..

So eevn just typing this was not quick .. nor easy

Waz

poopipe said:

It won't be quick and easy even if you aren't new to it. 
90+% of people will get better results faster if they do it by hand (using prebuilt modules etc)

It only makes sense to develop an automated system for this sort of thing if you have a shit load of them to make or if you want to make the system for the fun of it 

That's my worry. I looked into Houdini a bit, but I would be starting from scratch. I've' got about 30 ships to explode

Benjammin said:

Houdini - although it won't be quick and easy if you're new to it. 

Yeah, would be nice to contract it out I feel like, as it would take so long to learn Houdini and get results.

-

Was hoping this complex task had been tackled by somebody for quick and easy results. Seems like such a common thing to have to model for games. For my last game I used a Shatter plugin for 3ds Max.

I had a look at Rayfire and tyFlow for 3ds Max but their examples seem more like breaking walls and deforming cars.

poopipe

30 is enough that I'd be looking at automating the process but not enough that I'd be willing to embark on a research project. 

The sticky part is your use of the word 'grow' .  growing a framework requires that you understand all sorts of things about the structure and purpose of your model that are effectively impossible to work out programmatically - we would have much better decimation tools if it were a solved problem
 
if you drop the idea of growing and instead use modular meshes for the framework etc. the vast majority of difficulties go away and you're left with a set of relatively simple problems. 

It's simple to automate separation of parts if you can tell the application what a part is  - maybe you use vertex color, material ID, maybe you can break it up by mesh element .. doesn't matter, as long as there's some information.   
Given those parts you can simulate an explosion at a point and move them away from it
You'll then have the information needed to place framework, cable,  debris meshes in vaguely appropriate positions / orientations

Klunk

It's all a bit vague, as it has so many variations, catastrophic to minor, lazer lancing to missile impact to internal minor explosions to complete dissintergration. Is this for rendering or ingame ? Either way the only way forward is to prototype on one model....
create the end result then work back to see what processes would create that and what effects are required to hide stuff that doesn't work that well.