Breaking Glass: Adding Dynamics to the Fractured Text

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  • Duration: 08:10
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  • Made with Release: 19
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Learn how to add dynamics to the Fractured Text Object, and use Particle Forces to create an explosive simulation. Also, learn how to control the Forces and keep the fragments from "misbehaving".

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Transcript

In the previous video, we modeled and fractured our text and now it's ready for Dynamics. So let's select the Voronoi Fracture, right-click and go to the Simulation Tags and add a Rigid Body. If I press play, you will see that everything falls down as you would expect, because we have gravity. Let's go to the Edit menu, Project Settings, all the way back here, Dynamics, General tab, and you will see that we have a gravity of 1,000 centimeters per second. Just double-click here, press zero, and Enter. And now, if I press play, you will see there's no more gravity. But we do have certain pieces which seem to have a mind of their own and they're flying away. I'm not going to deal with this problem right now and the reason is because my dynamic simulation is going to start from the very beginning, this is not going to be very obvious. Now, for any of you that would like to fix this, there are a couple of ways. You just go to your Dynamics tag and in the Dynamics tab, you can change the trigger of the dynamics from Immediately to something like Velocity Peak or On Colission and you can activate the dynamic simulation. If you use that Velocity Peak, for example, using some sort of MoGraph Effector. I have done this in other tutorials, so just go search on Cineversity and you will find out. So I'm going to leave this at Immediately. And now, what I want to do is add some sort of initial force that creates that explosion we are looking for and the way to do it is by going to the Simulate Menu, Standard Particles, and we're going to use an Attractor. When you add an attractor and press play, you will see that the fragments are attracted to this attractor. What an interesting thing. Great. But I want to fix a couple of things. First of all, I'm going to go to my front view and with my Move Tool selected, I'm just going to click and drag and move this between the E and the A. That's where I want my initial explosion, so to speak, to exist. Let's go back to the 3D view. Press play and let's see a few problems here. First of all, we have these great explosions that are happening. I do not want that to happen. Number two, what I want to do is not attract, I want to repel these pieces and in order to do that, you go to the Attractor and you reverse the strength in the Object tab. So if I make this -10 and press Enter, you will see that this creates a repulsive force. Then I'm going to go to my top view and move it slightly backwards because I want these to move slightly forwards. There you go. That's better. Go back to my 3D view and the last thing I'm going to do with the attractor for now is to change the falloff into a sphere and go to my Scale Tool, click and drag and just make it larger so that the yellow sphere encapsulates the E, the A, and a bit of the K and the R. If I press play, you will see that mostly these are the areas affected. Now, I want this to be ever so slightly more powerful, so go back to the object. Let's make this -20, rewind, press play and I like what's going on here. And after this initial repulsion, I want them to be sucked in slightly and then I want a secondary explosion. That's the effect I'm trying to achieve. So what I'm going to do is go to frame 19. Set a keyframe for the strength to -20 which means 20 outwards. Go to frame 20 and what I'm going to do is reverse the motion by deleting my minus sign and adding a keyframe. So we go out then in, but what you will see is that the strength is not strong enough to suck the pieces in. So I'm going to go to frame 20 and make sure that this is something like 100 and let's refresh the keyframe, rewind, press play, there you go. Fantastic. So we go out, in, and you can see we go in and if you want to fine-tune it, you just press stop and then you can go frame-by-frame, but you can only go forwards if your simulation hasn't been baked yet. And what I want to do is add this point here. So it says frame 43, I'm going to go to frame 39. I am going to keyframe the strength. Then go to frame 40 and I'm going to go -500, keyframe this and see what happens. Boom. Boom. And I'm going to move these keyframes so click and drag 45 and 44. Rewind. I just want to give it a bit more time to suck, boom. There you go. Push, suck, boom. And I like this as my initial dynamic simulation. Now, of course, you can go and tweak things and make it look exactly as you want it to, but for what we are doing now, this seems to be perfect. So, stop it, rewind. And let's go and add a few more things. In the Dynamics tab, I'm going to go to the force and I'm going to add linear and angular damping of 25 and this is just going to hold some pieces from becoming extremely, let's say, naughty. And the other thing I'm going to do is tell the attractor that my speed limit is 4,000 centimeters. And again, if some pieces get a sort of urge to fly out in really, really high speeds, this speed limit will keep them in place. So, there you go. We have our initial explosion. And the next thing I want to do, you can see that at frame 87, we still have a lot of fragments in our scene. I want to make sure that around frame 70, everything just moves out. So for this to happen, I'm going to add another attractor. So I go here, Particles, Attractor, and because I want it to be a repulsive force, I'm going to set this to, let's say, Select All, -150. And I'm going to go to frame 69 or frame 70. Let's say this is when I want it to begin. At frame 70, I want the attractor. I go into the Basic tab and the Basic tab has the Enabled flag, which is basically the green tick box, and I'm going to set a keyframe on Enabled. And on frame 69, I'm going to disable it and put a keyframe for Disabled. Now if I rewind and play, you will see that at frame 70 we get this secondary explosion which in this case, doesn't look as powerful as I would want it to be. You can see it's enabled, but still, there's no force. So I'm going to go to the attractor, go to the Object tab and I'm going to change the mode from acceleration to force. The force actually applies a much stronger force to the dynamic elements. Look at this. Boom. There we go. Boom. And that looks exactly like I want it to. So my main dynamic simulation is finished now. In the next video, I'm going to add a few tweaks to it to make it look a bit more realistic, a bit nicer. And later on, we are going to shade this and make it look like interesting fragments of glass.
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