Building Destruction

Final Turnaround

Initial Plan

My Plan for this specialisim project was to produce 3 pieces of work in one to try to achieve a higher grade and a more complete project: 


I think it might have been too ambitious as this was my first time trying all of these areas and with only a few weeks, i should have picked one of thses areas to really go in depth; but I do think there was some reasoning to doing all three as the asset pack allowed me to get closer to the look i wanted and made it easier to setup the geometry for the simulation.

Overview

Modular Pieces

For the modular pieces I went with the russing "Commie Block" style of architexture which is very brutalist with lots of repatition that I thought I could use to my advantage as well as the generally depressing atmosphere lots of these evoke.
It did also help that these buildings matched some of my references and so it would help me match the fx to the reference closer.

I used maya and substance to texture the assets and then I rendered the images in mantra. This is pretty standard modelling and texturing so I wont go into it, the only thing that I was super careful about was to ensure none of the geometry intersected with any others because I wasn't sure if it could cause issues with the RBD simulation.

RBD Workflow

For the RBD sim this was my first time doing anything of the sort but instead of watching someone who knew what they were doing, I dived in head first.


I was using this missile strike from the war in Ukraine as my main reference for my FX.

I started by fracturing all the buildings pieces using the rbd fracture nodes and connecting the controids of each with a glue constraint; I think I could have easily gotten away with simpler pieces bonded in more interesting ways and that would help the iteration speed as each time i changed a setting it was minutes before I would see the results.

I did make some efforts towards increasing speed, for the areas closest to the explosion I scattered the fracture points more densely and sparser for further pieces meaning more resolution in the sim where there was more need for it but I think this went too far and left places too low resolution and the impact had pieces that were too small and were slowing the simulation.


Here I am running the geometry though a solver that copies an attribute from the collider emulating the missile to the geometry; where the attribute is strongest, there will be the most fracturing.

After the geo is fractured and constrained, I pipe it with velocities and colliders into the dop network

For reference, this is not the best or even a good way to set out this DOP network, but then again, this was my first time setting one of these up.

I am running the packed building geometry into the rigid body solver  with velicies that I am copying to the geometry using the sop solver. Then I have the ground plane and the missile proxy brought in as colliders before gravity and the glue constraint network are added.

Again, not the way to set it out but for anyone just starting this is a starting point for getting working dop networks when building from the ground up.

Once I had simulated, i split out every object with a different shader in the simulation to bring into maya separately to make assigning shaders easier. 

In hindsight I should have baked down almost all of the textures into one set of udims, however it wouldn't have solved this issue as the alembics would be too heavy to put into only one or two files.

Pyro Workflow

For pyro I made heavy use of the debris shelf tool, that mostly setup the whole simulation for me, I then just added some smoke from the missile hitting the building.

I should mention that, here is where I went away from my references as I wanted a more smokey less firey explostion, but i think that i should have stuck closer to the reference as it just looked kind of mushy in the end.

Rendering

For rendering, I as always, wanted to find some way to import the geo and volumes into maya to render with arnold. However I was unable to do this as I did not know how to export from houdini and was running out of time. If i had known about it I would have rendered in Arnold for Houdini  but there was no meantion of it being installed so I didnt use that either. I used mantra for the whole thing and rendered it all on one layer.

This was incredibly slow...

And that was just for greyscale...

Unfortunaly I was unable to render the project with the textures that I had spent time on towards the beginning of the project; I think it would have helped greatly with the end look and given it some more realism. This was caused by the frames rendering so slowly with textures and glass especially that if I wanted to deliver the rest of the project on time I needed to render without them.