RBD DISINTEGRATION
For this project, I wanted to spice things up in Houdini by combining an RBD simulation with some Pyro magic. The goal was to give a bearded man model an eye-catching disintegration makeover.
The fun part? Well, the model breaks into a whopping 200 pieces, and each of those pieces goes even further by splitting into 20 more. All this action is fueled by the Pyro simulation and good ol' gravity. It's a bit like a chaotic yet beautiful dance of destruction and creation, and I'm pretty stoked about how it turned out.
Attribute Paint
In the early stages of this project, I kicked things off by bringing in a model with a whopping one million polygons. Now, you can probably imagine that such a heavy load wouldn't be too friendly when it comes to running a smooth simulation.
So, I rolled up my sleeves and decided to give the geometry a bit of a trim. My focus was on keeping those essential high-detail spots around the eyes, nose, and mouth intact. The less crucial areas, like the back of the head, could afford to shed some polygons. To tackle this, I got creative and used an attribute paint technique to highlight the high-detail zones and then applied the polygon reduction, using this attribute paint as a trusty mask.
Material Fracture
Now, let's dive into the real magic of this project: the RBD Material Fracture node. This is where the object gets shattered into countless tiny pieces, all thanks to the concrete material type. I even threw in some nifty interior and edge details to keep things from looking too cookie-cutter. To get a clearer picture of the action, check out the Exploded View node – it's where you can see the whole breakdown in action.
PYRO SOLVER + DOPNET
Moving on to the Pyro Solver – that's what we use to kick the velocity into high gear. Then, we get everything packed up and bring it all into a DOPnet. Within the DOPnet, the Rigid Body Solver comes into play, where we harness the power of those packed pieces. We introduced a Pop Advect by Volume as the post-solve step, creating a nifty synergy between the pieces and the Pyro simulation, injecting a dynamic flair into the mix.
Following that, we dive into the realm of constraint manipulation using a Sop Solver and a trusty Delete Node armed with bounding box animations. This is where we sculpt the evolving connections between the pieces as time unfolds, shaping the overall narrative of our simulation.
redshift render
After wrapping up the simulation, we spiced things up by slapping a simple texture on the surface of our RBDs, and for that extra touch of elegance, we adorned the insides of the pieces with a luxurious gold texture. To keep our rendering process running like a well-oiled machine, we meticulously saved every frame of the animation as a Redshift proxy.
With all that in place, the final stretch involved setting up a backdrop, fine-tuning the camera angles, playing around with the lighting, and last but not least, producing the animation using the Redshift.