For an upcoming project I’d like to find a way to slowly “dissolve” a wall from the top down… the dissolving pieces should turn into particles (“dust”) that slowly rise into the air. While researching different methods I came across a script for C4D that seems to be well suited for this kind of task: Weight Map Propagation (see, e.g., this video: https://vimeo.com/73997991).
Is there anything similar for Blender? Or can anybody offer a different idea to achieve an effect like that?
You could try using the explode modifier on a wall that has had the faces (or verts) sorted. In the example I have used a subdivided cubed as the wall. Add a particle system with zero gravity and zero velocity, and then add an explode modifier. Add a Wind force and a turbulence force to move the particles. In edit mode select all the vertices, go into top view and then in the Mesh menu select Sort Elements; select view Z-axis and select vertices or faces in the panel that appears on the left depending on whether particles are emitted from vertices of faces. When you run the animation the cube dissolves from the top.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve been using Blender for many years, but I hadn’t known that verts can be sorted. That, indeed, seems like a good idea for tackling this specific task. Will try and report back.
On a more general note: Isn’t there a more general method for exploding an object, starting from a pre-defined vertex (or vertices) and then propagating the explosion according to a custom scheme? I was thinking in the direction of that script for C4D mentioned before. Something like that could come in handy, say, for creating a burning piece of paper.