Real Time Damage

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Would anyone know if there is a way to cause a mesh to change in the middle of the animation? More specifically, is there a way to have space ships blowing chunks out of each other? Thanks in advance.

2

no way you wouldn’t expect

you’d create vertex keys or use armatures or sepearte meshes or textures that change over time… in other words, everything would be very manual and quite painful

3

I just got an idea, not sure if it’s feasible, but here goes:

  1. You split up your spaceship into chunks, while keeping the shape intact.
  2. You parent a particle emitter, preferably an angled plane, to each chunk separately, so that you end up having a chunk-emitter pair for each chunk.
  3. Make sure the planes are placed and angled correctly so that the shape of the ship is not broken. (Someone should make a script for this)
  4. You set the emitted particle count to 1, and make sure that the particles are emitted as 0 speed. This will produce “static” particles which will perfectly fit the shape of the spaceship.
  5. Create a projectile that will crash into the chunks. Remember to set it to be a particle deflector beforehand.
  6. Animate and watch the shit being blasted out of your spaceship! Add some funky fireworks to spice it up and there you go!

Cheers,

Tom

4

Very similar to something I did recently - I had to make a bunch of houses blow up…

Try breaking the ship down into chunks, but making the chunks all seperate objects.

Make a “Chunk” particle emmitter with a nicely bent and broken small fragment of ship - Make it emmit for a couple of frames only starting from the frame of impact.

When a chunk gets hit, use an IPO to shift it to an inactive layer then activate the “Chunk Emitter” described above to explode debris out into space.

Cover the whole thing with a second halo emitter to make a nice explosion and Bob’s your embarrising uncle who doesn’t get invited to parties any more.

5

If you just want the ship to morph and warp when it gets hit then try implementing a SOFTBODY effect on the ship. Create a vertex group and weight paint where you want the ship to buckle (weight set to 0 so that it buckles, 1 so it doesn’t) - don’t forget to add this vertex group in the GOAL section of the SOFTBODY dialog. Create your projectile and activate the DEFLECTION button, and animate it so that the projectile hits the softbody ship. BAKE the softbody, add special effects (partciles) and hey presto! Deformed ship!