Render Room Smash Effect Part 1

Now that the rig was working to a good standard and had been thoroughly tested and evaluated by the necessary departments, it was time for me to begin work on specific effects shots. The first one that I was asked to work on was the render room smash scene in which an alien bursts through a door shattering glass as it does.

Given the importance of the scene it was critical that I found the best way of creating this effect if this scene was to add to the final piece.

Having had some experience in the last project with shatter effects, I was confident that I would be able to approach this project in a similar way. I would go about making the geometry of a window pane, creating shatter effects inbuilt in to mayas functionality and then carry on using rigid body simulations and fields to create the broken glass effect.

However I soon ran in to problems creating the shatter effect. It seemed that the maya calculations were not capable of creating the detail of shatter that we needed. Although we could have continued down this route and eventually found a solution, I decided that it may be better to take a different approach that may save time and be less likely to crash maya.

My logic was as follows. Did a window pane geometry need to be considered a solid geometry with complex 3D shatter? My answer to this is no- it is not. a window pane is so thin that from the front, you would notice the shatter across the face of the geometry, where as from the side the shatter effect would be negligible.

Hence do we need 3D shatter? No.

instead I though of a sequence of things that, with modeling help from Greg and Ollie, I would be able to achieve a hand made shatter with relative ease. I decided that it may be easier to start off with a plane. that plane could be resized to fit the window pane. Now from here I could start splitting the geometry to create the shatter pattern. i would extract all the faces, extrude them to give depth and the window shatter would be done. This method has many advantagess over the maya shatter.

1. It is not intense on ones computer- less crashing
2. It would save time on processing data
3. A uniform shatter would not seem that it had been broken from a source- it s uniform and random
4. One can make custom shatter effects and have complete control on the visual effect.

From this, I could continue using fields and rigid body simulations to create the final effect.

The following demonstrates the glass cracking, i.e. no rigid body simulations of fields, we simply key frame visibility on two types of glass- one which is solid, and replace that with shattered version. The transition is so fast that one could not notice its replacement.