Hello, so I’ve been using the fracture modifier for a while and my work flow is to fracture in the fracture modifier build and use alembic to bring it to 2.81a, this method is great but i always had problems with smooth shading, my fix was to set the object to flat shading and call it a day but i don’t want to do that anymore so I’m trying to find a way to get smooth shading working, here’s a video of the problem
Stuff i tried
edge split
fix normals button
converting the simulation to animated objects and appending them in instead of alembic
Edit: i found a fix, set the fracture modifier simulation to flat shading with auto smooth turned off, then when you bring it to 2.81a just click auto smooth
it works but it’s still not perfect, is there a away to make it smoother?
Update 2 i was able to make it completely smooth using flat shading > fix normals > perform merge > auto hide distance, then turning on auto smooth once its imported to 2.81a using alembic
Hmm, usually it might crash after alembic import if you used multiple materials and have not transferred them over to the new (2.8x) blend. Alembic just transfers the face’s material numbers afaik, but not the materials themselves. Or did it already crash in 2.79 with FM and autohide / automerge ? Autohide/merge and fix normals is far from being perfect … especially when being used in combination. All weird shading artifacts can happen with that and perform merge enabled. I assume it is because of the varying tessellation of the shard ngons (which seem to flip around)
It didn’t crash in 2.79 and in 2.81a the object had no materials, the sad part is i was able to make it perfectly smooth with autohide/merge and fix normals but then alembic failed me and started to crash whenever i hit play
What is your guys reason to use Alembic? With Fracture the vertex count doesn’t change, so you can just use mesh cache which is a gazillion times more performant.
My workflow with an animation with gazillions of shards was to simulate in FM branch and then use MDD with mesh cache modifier to get it into Blende 2.82 Alpha. I needed it in 2.82 because 2.82 supports “Random by Islands” in the shader graph. That way you can give the shards some variation.
Alembic was way too slow while MDD did a very good job.
It is because Alembic can take varying topology into account as well. This happens when autohide and automerge are being used to hide inner faces and / or attempt to fix normals and merge gaps to restore smooth surfaces.
is there a away to fracture an armature? I tried exporting it as alembic then fracturing the animated alembic but that didn’t work, once i click fracture on the animated alembic it loses its animation.
i found another workaround which is using a proxy but it’s very difficult to get the proxy to match the momentum and make it look natural
maybe “Fracture Animated Mesh Settings” may help to some extent.
You need to duplicated the armature mesh for it, put an FM onto, and fracture.
Then set the original armature mesh to its rest pose (aka disabling the armature mod, with the eye icon)
Then in the FM of the duplicated object, pick the original Armature mesh as “Animation Mesh” and check “Use Animated Mesh” as well as “Use Rotation”. Then click “Bind” to attach the FM shards to the armature mesh.
(And make the FM object "Animated " in rigidbody settings)
Now, if you play the animation, the shards should follow the armature.
Triggering should work with it too, so pieces can fall off.
But, there is a catch. Autohide / merge isnt good enough in that case to close the gaps between the shards properly and I do not deform the shards so the gaps remain closed. So it will have visible
bigger gaps between the shards.
Autohide / merge and perform merge work best with voronoi+boolean, since the resulting shards are exactly adjacent voronoi cells (to find “shared” verts in the autohide distance and merge them across the automerge distance) . But the geometry needs to be suited for it (needs to be manifold etc). Voronoi+Bisect might work without those conditions, but is slower and its filling algorithm is rather unreliable.
I hope this is the right place and first of all i want to thank you for this great addition for blender. I would like to ask how the port to 2.8 is going or what the state is? Cant wait to use it.
hello!
I was wondering, what are the plans for the future of this project? Is there gonna be a 2.8 version, or will it be integrated in master at some point?
@ArtPomelo: @Bernardo: @Ryukai:
It has been repeatedly stated by the devs behind the FM-Project: There will be an integration into 2.8x at some point, it is clearly planned, but more of a long term plan.
I don’t think anyone can give you a better answer than this, at this time.
I know the second quote I included here is half a year old, but this probably tells us not to expect sudden fast progress on the 2.8 integration.
Given Tons recent plans to change the release numbering, it’s imho very likely to end up a 2.9x- if not 3.x-integration.
Is there documentation for Automations - Combine and Connect?
I want a multi-story building to collapse after destroying the first floor but the upper floors just stay in the air. The shards on the first floor don’t break anymore (all thresholds/angles to 0.1) after separating the floors in several objects and using Connect. Using Combine just makes the whole building collapse as soon as the animation starts, reactivating animated and triggered, again the first floor breaks but the upper floors stay in the air.
What am I doing wrong?
