Cement Cracking Effect?

I’m curious how one would go about creating the effect of an extremely heavy object being dropped onto a solid surface, and “cracking” the surface. Think when the “Hulk” drops off of a building and lands on the pavement. The pavement breaks apart and cracks, and indents.

A perfect example would be the very first part of this tech demo from Berkley where the steel ball bearing lands on the glass. Can blenders physics simulations do this?

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Shorts/BreakingObjects.avi

I would probably go with a driven shape key, at least for the hulk’s example.

So once a certain bone’s ( say the hulk’s feet bones ) reach zero, the floor mesh cracks shape key turns on, or something like that. You’d probably want a few keys, say for when before it hits the ground, a ground hitting and then how fast it cracks up.

But for a wrecking ball or something like the linked video, a simulation is clearly more practical.

That’s easy. Just press the “Make Awesome Life-like Break Simulation” button.

O RLY?!?! Is that next to the “Make Wall-E Animated Feature Film button?”

I believe that it is right next to tha button actually - I am still looking for the “voice prompter input button” so I can just tell blender what to do.

Setting up shape keys and then animating between them so that it looks like he is really crushing that concrete - throw a little particle cloud up as they feet hit and your probably golden.

if there was voice it should not need a button to activate.

I don’t think blender can do this with physics alone.

Here is a breaking ice demo file.

Attachments

breaking_ice_test.blend (208 KB)

Thanks Atom, that should get me started in the right direction.

On a side note, maybe this is the type of thing that will come out of Durian tools in the future.

It is most likely obvious but what modifier is used in this blend file? i can`t seem to find it.

Bazing! Wow I am happy! I asked for this last month, and the tech for it seems to be in the works thanks to Pildanovak! Check out this thread to see what I mean. The videos of the cracking glass/walls are exactly what I was asking for in this thread.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=145074