How To Vastly Improve Solidshatter

[david-schoneveld]

I've long liked/hated solid shatter. It sucks, but it does a better job than you can by hand. For those of us with out blast code, here's a way to make solid shatter work much faster and more stable... and more powerful (because you can now shatter at numbers around 100+ with no problem, before it just crashes on higher numbers, as you probably know)

Ok so what's the main thing wrong with it? It's cutting plane is too high resolution and it's triangulated, so working with it quickly becomes a pain. I would work it in to have the resolution of that plane in the shatter window, but I've not had the time. So here's how you can fix it quick and dirty.

Solid shatter is one mel script for the function, the window and some other global procs are elsewhere.

Find and open solidShatter.mel you can find it by puting this in the command line-> whatIs solidShatter;
on line 144 you should see:

polyTriangulate -ch 0 ($plane[0]+".f[0:"+($faceCount[0]-1)+"]");

comment that out, I know you don't need an example of that...

//polyTriangulate -ch 0 ($plane[0]+".f[0:"+($faceCount[0]-1)+"]");

on line 956 you should see:

int $resolution[3] = { 40, 40, 50 };

change that to

int $resolution[3] = { 10, 10, 10 };

I've tried 20, 20 ,20 and that works too but you can't shatter quite as many at one time, 100 crashed on my comp... Whatever, anyway that is where it is, also note that the edge "jaggyness" won't have as many newances and details, but I'd rather have quantity and better made geometry than that crack's detail. So I'm still messing around but I'm very happy that it actually works, and is SO much more stable. You can play with that and find maybe a better setting you like. If someone gets it working in the shatter effects window I'm interested in it. Otherwise when I get around to it I'll post a how to. It looks firly annoying since you have to change the whole solidShatter proc to do it, since that window only calls the proc. Ok enjoy,

[joojaa]

by convertting the code into api.

The shatter is totaly mel., its not realy a production tool but rather a example on how you CAN use mayas dynamics eingene in cojunction with scripting all the effects in the menu are. Its one of thos ethings they have includedd so you can have something to refeer to.

Samme actualy applies to curve and surface flow etc... they are examples, not all in all tools. Thy are menat for you to build on. BUt i guiess you have

Anyway blastcode isnt anything special! Infact its often just waste of your money. ANyway thers plenty of tweaking you can do,

[jtk77]

just wanted to say nice post. This is pretty darn helpful, never looked at it that way

[joojaa]

Well yes i could read the code of shatter form staart to end but thing is i havent got the time. Would be nice if i actualy had time to do it all.

But yes if theres some specific step thats makeing you wonder then THAT i may be able help yopu with.

Tough to be hoenest theres a different way this could be done i will look into it once i get time. It uses a approach more like the legoize script everybody is working on!

[david-schoneveld]

there is in the code already the resolution as an imput for a few of the procs, which is basically what I changed by hand. The part that kind of got me stuck was the
(this is a global proc used in shatter but found in includeShatterEffectsGlobals.mel)

CODE
global proc setNotIntermediate( string $shard )
// Description: sets $shard and all meshes in its hierarchy to be not intermediate.
{
    // do the object itself
    setAttr ($shard+".intermediateObject") false;

    // now all mesh shapes in its hierarchy
    string $meshChildren[] = ls -objectsOnly -dag -allPaths -geometry -type mesh $shard;
    int $idx;
    for( $idx = 0; $idx < size( $meshChildren ); $idx++ )
        setAttr ($meshChildren[ $idx ] + ".intermediateObject") false;
}

I couldn't get that to work outside of the proc so I just left it at that point. (i'm on a mac and wonder if that's the case) The sciipt can also be improved by how it moves the points around on the cutting plane. It actually turn it into a soft body, then take that away. Of course there are simpler ways of doing that, not sure if they are more stable/faster. Also I thought I'd like to add more control over the rotation so you could restrict the rotation and not have to rely on the seed for your rotation. Anyway, we all have the same problem, time to spend on this. I know in a month or two I'll be needing it so I'll be able to spend more time on it then. if someone else doesn't get to it first