Tutorial 6: Shockwave effect

In this tutorial we will learn how to create a shockwave effect using Pulldownit Pro and the Shatter it! feature in 3D Max.

1. Creating the crack path.

Open the file shockwaveInit.max in Max. It is a very simple scene; there are three objects, a couple of rectangular boxes and a sphere. First, we have to create the path along which the terrain is going to crack. Select the Shapes panel and under Splines select line, define a path in the viewport so it remains mostly inside the terrain object, this is going to be the cracking path; when finished, select the sphere object and open the Motion panel, and then the Assign

controller tab, select the position entry and open the controllers window( clicking on the button above), choose path constraint from the list which appears; now in the Path parameters tab click on Add path button following by selecting the spline line just created. Now you should see how the sphere object runs over the curve when playing the scene, this sphere is going to be the cracker object.

If you are not happy with the path just created, you can always modify it by selecting and moving its vertex, it is interesting also to affect the speed of the sphere by unchecking the constant velocity parameter in the Path parameters tab as well as the frames extension of its motion by displacing the animation keys which have been created. Notice that the sphere`s motion frames extension is defining the duration of the shot as well as the speed of propagation, so less frames means a more faster cracking and more of them lead to a slower one, nevertheless the strength of the cracking process can be balanced using dynamics parameters as we will se later in this document.

2. Using Shatter it! for pre-cutting the terrain.

Now we are going to pre-cut the terrain object, load the Pulldownit plugin and open the shatter it! Tab , let the default parameters and set 128 shards, then hit shatter it! button, you can see how the terrain is quickly shattered in paving-like fragments of similar size. But we would like to have more resolution of fragments along the curve, for achieving this, you can use the path based style, but in this tutorial we are interested in showing the refine capability of shatter it!. First set a top view of the terrain, select it and open the group window from the main menu, ungroup the fragments. There are several ways to select the crossing fragments; our preferred is by using the fence selection region, you can define a polygonal region around the curve and all the fragments affected will be automatically selected, moreover you can always remove any of them from the selection if you are not happy with it.

Once selected the crossing fragments, change the value of num shards parameter to 32 ( this is enough for this shot) and hit the shatter it! button again, you can see now how nicely the selected fragments are shattered along the curve. You can set a different number of shards for some of the selected fragments to increase the chaotic aspect of the crack.

3. Setting dynamics properties.

Switch to perspective view, open the Properties Tab of the Pdi plug-in and after selecting the ground object set it as convex hull passive, then select the sphere object and set it to auto, notice the passive checkbox is activated because this object has already animation keys. Now we are ready to create the fracture body for the terrain, select all the objects from the viewport except the ball, open the Fracture Basic Tab and click on create button, then click OK button on the pop-up window. At this moment the fracture body Fbody0 should appear in the fractures list. The ground object has been included because we dont want the terrain fragments to slide over the ground. Now we are going to adjust some parameters for achieving the desired propagation effect; the default break threshold is too high for this effect, so reduce it to 10.0 units, we would like to have a clear main crack stream and as few secondary cracks as possible therefore better to reset the clusterize parameter to 0, we dont want the released fragments to slide over each other so set a high friction (0.9), finally you can control the strength of the crack with the bounciness parameters of the fracture body, this time we are interested in a low-energy crack with little or medium displacement of fragments so we set a low bounciness(0.3). Close the Fracture Basic Tab.

For the shockwave effect we would like the fragments of terrain to appears as very heavy with little vertical displacement and almost any spin aside the main crack, there are several ways of getting this but the easier one is to increase gravity for example to (0, 0,-200.0) units, you can do it in the Simulation options Tab. This is a good idea to save the scene with a different name after setting all the Pdi properties.

4. Simulating and baking keys.

We are ready to begin cracking the terrain, you can start by playing some frames of simulation using the start, stop, reset and resume buttons of the Simulation options Tab, and adjusting the strength of the crack with the bounciness parameter of the fracture body and the sphere, when you get finally agree with the result, just let the simulation end to bake all the keys. After a few minutes the keys are done, in scenes with more than 1000 objects is interesting to release memory clicking in Simulation options -> Manage pdi World >Delete All Pdi Entities button for saving resources as now the keys are driving the animation.