Wrecking Shop - How to Create Disorder

[catwoman69y2k]

Wow, has it been a while since I been on these forums.  I have been traveling back towards 3D, this time in the form of needing to create a pile of stuff in complete dissarray.  Think of little Timmy going thorugh the room and just kicing/throwing things around.  Some things will need to crack or bend with impact from the wreckage. However, what Im most curiosu about is if this kind of thing can be done easily for many objects through some sort of MEL script on the modelign end of things. 

It is likely that I would find some  stuff in the animation section for this forum, but I am not interested in animating it.  I just want to  model a room in this degree of chaos for some still images.

What would be the best way to "wreck shop".  I have things like beds, bookshelves, cups, glass, tables, pillows, dice... you name it.

[joojaa]

Quick suggestion from the top of my head (which isnt the necceserily best way to deal with things). Use geometry paint, get the melscript and randomize the object to isntantiate every draw. Tom ake this even better quality paint on plane thet slightly on top of your floor. Then let dynamics dorp thisng on the floor one by one then once they start to settle geo to the next one etc. You may want to have some of the alernate rigid body solvers ofr this as the default maya one si pretty slow but no matter if you do it one by one.

For breaking things look at the many voronoi splitting scripts.

But yeah pixar has a paper on this if i remeber correctly. You can look into their library:

http://graphics.pixar.com/library/

[catwoman69y2k]

Use geometry paint, get the melscript and randomize the object to isntantiate every draw.

Can you please elaborate?  I dont know if I plan on doing anything with the floors yet. Mostly want to break the objects (plates, cups) and stack things like chairs and beds all in a heap.  Think of the house after a tornado has been through it.

[joojaa]

yeah here it is:

http://graphics.pixar.com/library/AnyoneCanCook/paper.pdf

Especially the trash pile.

[catwoman69y2k]

Wow! Very long PDF.  Looks like a huge read.  Tried to find the part about the trash pile (is it in the section that talks about makign food look bad?) but was unsuccessful.

[catwoman69y2k]

While I have waited to find better info, I did find that maya comes with a Shatter Effect (From Dynamic menuset; Effects > Shatter). However, it doesnt seem to give me the results I want.  Also, did find some MEL  scripts that might handle things, but obviously they have to be compatible with Maya 2009 (I do not have money for latest version). 

Maybe I do need to animate this and then "photograph" the aftermath when all these objects have exploded.  Any tutorials you can recommend for doing an explosion on many grouped polys wihtin a "room"?

[catwoman69y2k]

 I did follow this tutorial and hook up a simulation of an explosion with a particle emitter.  My only problem is that the pieces did spread out (from an omni emitter). However, I cant seem to control how far/close the shards spread apart (the overall "strength" of the explosion.  It is after the explosion, I could probably "take the picture" of all the explosion aftermath for my scene.  Im still not sure if that is faster orr if I should just break stuff apart (and spread the debris) manually, rather than have the particle emitters do the work.