Breaking through ground

[pabs]

Hi there,

I'm currently trying to work on a vfx shot where a building comes up from the ground in a field and was curious how one might approach this in terms of the breaking up of the ground, grass, soil etc.

I don't think I'd use a 'shatter' plug-in as there wouldn't be sharp pieces but maybe some cloth geometry for the ground and pre-create the cracks (with glu) which the geometry of the building then pushes through?

Just curious if there's a better way to approach this? Any help is much appreciated! Many thanks! 

[bjohnston]

There are many ways to fracture models...there are many fracture scripts out there and PDI has a fracturing tool that works pretty well.  Most are procedural and you may want to model the main fractures yourself if you need specific fracture placement and control. 

Use displacement mapping to minimize sharpness of the fractured geo.

Be very wary of Maya's native solver, but I think that DMM in Maya 2012 is almost up to the task (for simple things).  I often use nCloth solver for my rigid sims. Also take a look at DMM if you are not a script/plugin kinda fellow. 

You can use instanced particles for the smaller debris pretty effectively and then cover it all up with additional particles and or fluid "dust/dirt" elements.

Hope this helps.