Applying the Shatter Script- Destroying Anomalies!

Now that I had fully tested my script on a basic piece of geometry, the time had come to really put the script to the acid test. I had not yet had any experience in doing these various effects on objects imported from Z-Brush where Ollie Kane had sculpted the model and hence was apprehensive about it. How would the model be affected with regards to its topology?

With this in mind, I proceeded with testing. Here is the first model I received from Ollie and the consequent testing trial.





Doing this test taught me a lot about the necessary requirements that Ollie would need to adjust for me to optimize my shatter effect to its fullest.

On observing the video above, there were two main conclusions to be derived.

Probably the biggest error of all is found with the head. You will notice that it is completely unaffected by the shatter effect. Upon discussing the matter with him further, my suspicion was proved correct that the head had two major defects.  One was that the head was not a closed piece of geometry. By definition a solid shatter would fail to effect it as it is not even a solid piece, i.e closed. Its second major flaw was that it was simply combined from one mesh from two. I will address this point later as it sparked an idea for improvement. But one may see how confusion may arise as to what needs shattering if the mesh is one combined mesh from multiple objects.

The second point that you will notice is that even though I pushed the shard count as high as I could, we have a very uneven distribution of shard sizes. Thinking about this problem, I had two objectives to achieve- to increase the number of shards and keep these pieces relatively equal in size. I decided that if i wanted Maya to be optimized then it would be better to have the mesh separated into three (or ideally more) separate uncombined pieces. In this way- we would avoid having very large pieces that span the model from to bottom, and this also means that the maya shatter can be applied on each piece separately.

Since Maya struggles with calculating a high count of shard shatter in one go- it logically foillowed that maya may be able to to multiple shatters one turn at a time. i.e instead of applying a 100 piece shatter on the entire statue, model the statue into 3 pieces and create 3 shatters each with 33, 33, 33 shatters- these two operations are equal, yet one may cause maya to each and one will not. In this way I managed to create a shard count that exceeded 600 pieces all in all, where as when i tried applying a shatter before, the maximum shard count was under 50.


Then I was able to apply the collision layer correction script to then avoid any issues that would cause errors.


Here a sequence of videos that depict the evolution of my effect based on the logic above.












Here the tweaking was made to create a slow motion effect from the shatter.