Hi,
I'm working on a scene where a character is kicked through a window, then the whole thing slows down on impact for a sort of matrix-like homage camera dolly in slo-mo with lovely glass shards floating through the air around him as he sails inevitably towards the cold-hard pavement below.
Currently i've got a plane, split it into about a thousand pieces via shatter tool and made them all active rigid bodies, then made a proxy of the character (about 20 simple shapes) and turned these proxy objects into passive rigid bodies. Unsurprisingly, maya shits a chicken when i try to calculate him going through this plethora of pieces, there is too much to calculate (i'm on a fairly fast dual core machine, but a dual core nonetheless), curiously it cannot even calculate him going through a small selection of the pieces (about 20).
Is there a better way of doing this (there must be)? I'm tempted by a few of the many destruction plugins out there (blastcode etc) but am not sure if they actually calculate faster than rigid body dynamics or whether they will be user-friendly to a dynamics noob such as myself? I've tried abandoning the character proxy idea and just using a radial force at the point of impact, but this fails just as miserably. The problem is really in the fact that there are so many fricking pieces of glass (i need this many for realism though to be fair), so i'm a little stuck with it.
Any help would be appreciated, cheers!
Tom