Understanding Particles and Dynamics in Maya—Part 8

Final product image — What You'll Be Creating

1. Bullet Shatter System

Step 1

Open Maya. Create a box and a ground plane as shown in the following image.

Step 2

Create a sphere and animate its position so that it could pass through the chunks of the box.

Step 3

With the box selected, go to Edit > Delete by Type > History. Alternatively, you can press Alt-Shift-D to clear the history.

Step 4

With the box selected, go to Effects > Shatter and click on its option box.

Step 5

It opens Create Shatter Effect Options window. Inside the Solid Shatter tab, keep the Shards value to default 33.

If you wish to have a greater number of broken chunks, you can increase the number of shards. Click on Apply button.

Step 6

You will see the box has been divided into several random broken parts as shown in the following image.

Step 7

With the broken parts of the box selected, go to Bullet > Rigid Set.

Step 8

With the sphere ball and the ground plane selected, go to Bullet > Passive Rigid Body.

Step 9

Open Outliner. With bulletSolver1 selected, go to Attribute Editor and click on the solidShatter1SetInitialState tab. Turn on Glue Shapes option, set Collision Set Type to hull and keep the Collision Shape Margin value to 0.

Step 10

Hit the play button and you will see the simulation of the broken chunks of the box object.

2. Installing Rock Shatter Script

Step 1

You can also shatter the objects using a useful script Rock Shatter. This is a very efficient and easy to use script which can break the objects in seconds.

Step 2

You can find the script in 3D Ocean market place. After buying the script, you can download it.

Step 3

Open the script folder and read the readme file to install the script.

Step 4

Open Maya. Go to Window > General Editors > Script Editor.

Step 5

In the Script Editor window, click on Clear All tab to clear any pervious entry of the script in text editor.

Step 6

Go to File > Load Script. Alternatively you can press Ctrl-O key also.

Step 7

Go to the folder where you have saved the script. Select ktRockShatter.mel file and click on Open.

Step 8

The script gets loaded in the script editor. Now it’s time to save the script in shelf.

Go to File > Save Script to Shelf.

Step 9

A small popup window appears. Write the name as Rock Shatter and click on OK.

Step 10

You can now see the Rock script inside the Custom shelf.

3. Shattering Object

Step 1

Create a box in the perspective viewport. With the box selected, go to Custom shelf menu and click on Rock Shatter icon.

Step 2

It opens the Rock Shatter script window. You can increase the number of broken chunks by entering the desired value in Parts option.

Decrease the Offset value to 0.005 to minimise the offset distance of broken chunks. Turn off Smoothed Parts option and click on Apply.

Step 3

Within a couple of seconds, the box gets several random cracks. These are the separate broken chunks of the box.

Step 4

You can see the chunks in the Outliner window.

Step 5

Create a ground plane. Create a sphere and animate its position so that it could pass through the chunks of the box.

Step 6

With all chunks selected, go to Soft/ Rigid Bodies > Create Active Rigid Body.

Step 7

With the ball and the ground plane selected, go to Soft/ Rigid Bodies > Create Passive Rigid Body.

Step 8

With all chunks selected, go to Fields > Gravity to apply gravity in the scene.

Step 9

Press the play button and you will see the simulation of the broken chunks.

4. Creating Cracks

Step 1

You can use this script to create cracked walls and surfaces. Create a boundary wall object in Maya as shown in the following image.

Step 2

Apply Rock Shatter script on the selected object. Keep the Parts value as 60 and turn on Smoothed Parts option. Click on Apply.

Step 3

The boundary wall gets broken into several random smoothed parts as shown in the following image.

If you want more broken parts, you can do so by selecting and breaking each broken part further into smaller parts. Select a broken part and apply the script onto it. This time keep the Parts value as 12 and click on Apply.