How to animate dirt being dug form a surface

Cint128

Hi everyone, I was just wondering if anyone knew a good way on how to animate dirt being mined from a surface in 3ds max. In our scene we have some excavators that are shovelling dirt from a bench of dirt in order to clear the area. I was just wondering if anyone had done any digging animations before/ could recommend a good way to do it.

Thanks for your input!

monster

I would model the mound of dirt in chunks and animate them getting pulled out with the shovels. You could also use physics to simulate smaller particles coming loose and tumbling down the mound. And finally, add particle effect puffs of dirt when the excavator hits the ground and drops its load.

It's not an easy project. Sorry I couldn't point you to an all in one solution.

gsokol

Yea, definitely depends on if you are looking to do offline rendering or real time..but what monster said would be y our best bet. Globs of dirt and some particle effects.

Cint128

Thanks for the response guys, most appreciated.
That sounds like a good idea, the only draw back to that I see if that we have several 1.5km benches that need to be minded which would mean they would have to be broken into heaps of these chunks, which im worried about performance issues if we put the scene into unity. A lot of the work is time-lapse so will be performed very fast (sorry should have mentioned this before) so that method might not work but i guess either way its just lots of repetitive moving sections of the bench so it looks like its being taken away. Thanks for you help if anyone has any other ideas let me know as its nice to have multiple options

monster

If the camera isn't up close to the action you can try using morph targets. But at 1.5 km that would be a lot of morphs.