Something that I could never do in Blender and my friend that uses Maya always did easily is vehicle wrecking (dunno if the word is correct) animations.
It’s possible in blender to make a simple metal-deforming animation using soft bodies and playing with the permanent deform setting. However, one thing that is still needed in order to allow better vehicle wrecking simulation is breaking/tearing physics for soft-bodies.
I’m waiting for the time when i’ll be able to set-up a car with physics properties and automatically animate realistic crashes.
I know it’s not a priority for the devs, and I wonder if something like this is planned for the next 2.5 or 2.6 versions… maybe a total rewrite in the soft bodies physics engine could emerge some advanced features, don’t know if anything is planned though. Some opensource projects has some nice breaking physics, maybe someone can help. Or maybe i’m the only who wants such feature :(.
So I just want to know if there’s any perspective for such feature.
It would be nice to have some features like this in the official Blender and I don’t think that a complete rewrite of softbody is needed, at least for softbody tearing.
The data of edge stress can be accessed, I think. We have the “Stress” mode for texture mapping…
I don’t think it would be necessary to code much thing also… At least the basic functionality is very simple…however, if i remember correctly, Blender had a tearing feature some time ago, but it didn’t work correctly. So the thing should be much more complex than we think. Or maybe no one demands this :).
I guess the development efforts are more focused on basic things for now (modelling for example), and after that will be more focused on rendering, integration with external renderers like Yafaray and Luxrender (very needed, and much promising features imho), so i have no actual hope for 2.5 final.
The mayor obstacle extending soft bodies with that is the fact that the API functions assume that the soft body modifier does not alter the number of vertexes, nor is allowed to create edges or faces.
The reason for this is that soft bodies were coded shortly before the modifier stack was.
At least the soft body API would need a complete rewrite permitting topological changes within the soft body module.
For now the focus in development is still get a stable and feature adequate 2.5 / 2.6 and there are no plans to touch the soft body module until this stage is reached.
How ever my simple tests only evaluating the stress on the edges only worked on rubber like membranes. In breaking complex structures other material properties that are not part of the softbody module right now need to be considered.