Just a random thought…
Do you think that the viscosity of the fliud sim could be turned up so high as to simulate brittle objects shattering like glass? Hmm…
http://blender.isoserv.com/uploads/shatter3.blend.zip
By Broken (and I think the discussion is in the “New Features” sticky in Finished Projects)
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That’s actually what got me thinking about it, but what intrigues me about using the fluid sim is that it has the ability to break up a mesh into droplets (Or maybe with tweaking into shards?)
Unfortunately, the brittle part is the problem - you need some way to handle object stiffness and elasticity for this… With other methods there’s been work on this (http://graphics.ethz.ch/~rkeiser/Papers/PBG2005/solid-fluid.pdf), but the way it’s done in Blender (with LBM) it will at least deform like clay. At least until someone comes up with a clever algorithm to do it 