Paint Fracture Maps

I posted a new (partly manual) workflow for fracturing volume meshes using Voronoi Texture Fracture. It describes how to deal with messy normals before inward extrusion and provides a method for painting your own fracture maps directly onto the mesh using Maya's 3D Paint Tool. Check out the thread in the SOuP Forum for details ...

Mesh fractured using Maya's 3D Paint Tool and Voronoi Texture Fracture

If the is enough demand (and if i find the time) i'll implement this workflow into the tool. 

Tool for Automated Dust Trails

I've got permission from RTT to present some of the tools i wrote for them over the last years. I'm not allowed to supply any script files for download but i can show their UI and functionality.

This one is called "Automated Dust Trails". Its a nParticle based dust trail tool that was optimized to work with RTT's car rig. I wrote the tool in 2009 when we prepared for the Lotus Elan spot, but it was used in many other productions since then.

The system uses dynamic hair follicles to read the speed of each wheel. The speed influences emission rates and density of particles. All relevant parameters (color, size, lifespan, density/opacity, emitter attributes, shading, etc.) are adjustable through a convenient UI, so even other operators with little to no experience in dynamics can generate dust trails easily.

Language: MEL 

Size: ~6500 lines (incl. UI)

Main features:

• automatic detection of RTT car-rigs
• automatic dust trail creation for any number of cars
• wheel velocity drives nParticle density & emission rate
• closestPointOnMesh / closestPointOnSurface nodes and in some cases colorAtPoint expressions are used for terrain specific dust trail options (e.g. to get the trail color from the terrain texture)
• use of a volumeNoise on the blobMesh channel of the particleCloudShader is based on a technique described in detail on djx blog, but goes further by controlling more shader attributes on a per-particle basis
• load and save presets option in menu
• all relevant attributes adjustable through a custom UI
• only few expressions, most of it is node-based to optimize performance

 (click to enlarge)

Magnetic nParticles

Some time ago I've been trying to achieve various magnet related particle effects. The first one was having particles form magnetic field lines around a simple bar magnet (or later any other object).

The particles are almost entirely expression driven (hermite, smoothstep and the like) with the help of some custom vector per-particle attributes. There are some additional attributes on the magnet controller which let you turn the magnet on and off, change its size and range as well as the number of field lines.

The field lines are still kind of static. There is a noise option (see image) but it's really basic and not adjustable for the time being (turned off in the video). As for now the particles are spread evenly over all field lines. But I'd love to have them accumulate at the start and end of a field line first, before they build the full shape. So I might update it when i find the time ...