From the last lesson, we proceeded to create the destruction to the other parts of the building, such as walls, bricks, supporting bits, and glass. For a faster way, the use of ‘For’ loops was implemented in the workflow, thus applying similar procedural destruction and noise to a lot of smaller pieces.
To make the process more optimized, as the meteor would only interact with specific parts of the building, we used the shape of a circle following a path of the meteor through the building (over about 6 frames) to select the surface that would have the interactions and apply more detailed patterns of destruction only to that area. Then all the various bits would get combined back into the building and proxy geometry would get created for the bullet solver to be able to handle the operations.
After finalizing where the lines of breaking points would be, we then added the constraints to guide how it will break and how strong the force of the glue holding it together will be with the use of “RBD Constraints from Rules” followed by “RBD Constraints Properties”. Then the building was divided into active and non-active sections and combined together with the bullet solver, which read the information for collision geometry of the Meteor Proxy that we made earlier. Hence we finally got a look at how the building will get destroyed once in contact with the meteor.
As there were two main contact points of destruction, to add realism we separated them out and made explosions at each point of entrance/exit. First, the volume geo was made by using the meteor proxy taken from a single frame, visualized with the “Trail Path” node, and changed into the volume. For every explosion, the trail path was adjusted to see visually how we wanted the particles to move.
Once the trail paths looked good, they were combined with the Collision geometry, and with the use of “Pyro Solver”, we achieved the final look of the explosion for each point of interaction.
The final addition was the smoke/dust coming from the separated parts of the building, resembling the dust from smaller particles of concrete broken apart. I managed to follow the tutorial and write out the first 15 frames for the required simulation, but my computer would crash after the frame 38 and not write out any caches, so my final video is of the destruction and smoke by themselves.
Overall, these two weeks of lessons were quite intense requiring a lot of computer power and memory, which was an obstacle in my case. I really enjoyed breaking down the process and messing around with details of instruments to get my own view of the destruction. However, looking back at the result it feels like the pieces at the second collision (a lower bit of the building) have too much force applied and are flying out too far out, which wouldn’t be the case in real-world as the meteor would have slightly less force at the 2nd point of exit.