Property of Uncharted Territory

Software: 3dsmax, FumeFX, Thinking Particles

The idea was to create a procedural system for the dust and all the secondary effects to be added to the collapsing houses after they have been animated. The secondary effects included wood splatter and breaking glass, but since the dust was covering all of that, those last 2 were not necessary for most of the houses. All the artist had to do was to import the collapsing house in the setup, plugin the house in TP, reposition/scale the fume box accordingly, and simulate.

1- Breakage detection:
In this step the TP system detects where the geometry is being broken so the emission of the dust is triggered.

Given, the model is pre-cut and the collapsing effect is applied. The inner sides of the cracks are predefined by the modelers with a certain Material ID.

A sample piece of a pre-cut house.

The inside edges of the cracks defined.

Particles are emitted and stuck to the inner sides of the cracks. So basically, each crack line consists of 2 facing surfaces, each surface has particles on it. Then each particle detects the closest particle, memorises it, and memorises the distance between both. And since the particles are sparse, the closest particle would be the one on the other surface of the crack. Now each particle on a surface has a “friend” on the other side of the crack.

Particles emitted and stuck to the inner side of the cracks.

When the breakage happens, particle “friends” are separated (distance increases) and that triggers the next step.

Distances between crack edges increase.