How to do car procedural destruction?

Brice Vandemoortele

I have a small offline rendering job, static image. I need to create a car that has been crunched like a soda can. I remember using the demo from PhysX where you could crunch metal barrels that looked really cool very quick. Reducing 'modeling' to 'hit my object with a virtual crate' does seem appealing.
I was wondering if anyone had experience with 'physic based modeling tool' or anything related (3dcoat for example seem to have a built in cloth simulator), or has experience with physX and how we could fetch back the models from the simulation.

thx

killingpeople

Brice Vandemoortele wrote: »

Reducing 'modeling' to 'hit my object with a virtual crate' does seem appealing.

sounds like a total waste of time, yet awesome

StJoris

I remember a max plugin called rayfire that seems to deal with destructions pretty well. Haven't tried it but it looks good.
http://www.mirvadim.com/

Mark Dygert

Brice Vandemoortele wrote: »

How we could fetch back the models from the simulation.thx

I'm not sure physics is going to be a good way to go, it will probably take longer to get the results you want then to just suck it up and model the damage yourself, create blendshapes/morph targets and animate them as the damage occurs.

If you're animating the damage, you could probably need to set up a few progressive morphs that blend from one to another. You could probably go as far as adding a few wave space warps to ripple the metal along with animated noise and FFD lattice cages.

Sims... that's going to take some time and probably is going to screw up more times then it gets right. There are a lot of connected pieces that are different consistencies and materials getting them all to act like they should and not freak out, well I'd say that's a challenge even for people who use that stuff all the time.

Max has reactor and conceivably you could set all of this up in it, but like I said there are just too many pieces to a car that behave differently then a blanket sim will do.

Slum

seems like something that would be better fit to just do by hand, if it's a still.

There are a few tricks you can do if its animated, but they only work in motion really.

kodde

Are we talking automated textures/decals as well? Or just modeling? If I were to approach this in Maya I would probably go for some approach with Lattice Deformer and the Sculpt Tool with some rough brushes. The shading/texturing part would be the most painful process I can imagine. But then again you might be able to get away with the 3D Paint Tool also within Maya.

Xoliul

I don't think a simulation will be adequate for what you want. In games full dynamic deforming is a very nice option, but for a static image I would want way more control. We had to do something very similar at school, I chose not to go for any automation because it was just too difficult or too much effort for me. So I ended up taking the car into Zbrush and doing it manually.
Here's my result if you care, not particularly proud of it though: [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmUl_brNKjw[/ame]
Being forced to do offline rendering stuff only and nothing realtime wasn't that good for my motivation last semester.

FicWill

Honestly what I'd change about that video is the reaction of the person, not the car. Assuming you'll get vfx particles trailing the car and fancy that up some - I'd rerecord the live video and pull the guy by a cable from off-camera or something. He reacts to the car before it hits him, and even if he's meant to be super-human, his lurching is too fluid given the car's abrupt stop.

Xoliul

Yeah I was afraid this was gonna seem like me highjacking the thread, but I really can't get that youtube thing to be a mere link instead of embedded video. My apologies, Brice.
So please: ignore anything but the car-damage to illustrate my point.. I know there is so much wrong with that video, but as i said, I pretty much hated my last sesmester of 3D.

Brice Vandemoortele

Hello everyone thx for your inputs
The guys ended up crushing a miniature car hehe! I have to do the broken glass tough so this is still relevant

Thx StJoris. Somebody showed http://www.blastcode.com/ , that looks pretty awesome too (I'm longing for this in realtime :P)

no harm Xoliul ^^ nice exercise, let's say he's a superhero

renderhjs

check out:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&Itemid=322&id=1482

the same can be done in max with the cloth modifier in which you can define as well different material types (not just cloth) and make soft vertex selections to define unaffected or different material behavior.