Hi again. Alright, lets get serious! I’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes work for the car project. Some research and development in order to achieve the required effects for the two shots we’ve planned. But sadly it has been a lot of trial and a lot more error. So I didn’t feel I was in a good place to show stuff until now.
Now that I had access to the two models, I was able to clean them up a little and optimize them in order to import them into my RnD scene and play with them. This is the result so far for the second shot.
As you can see it is still VERY rough, but it’s ok, its gonna be gorgeous by week 10 😉. To achieve this, I did a simple fracturing of the ground using voronoi and RBD add interior detail (I prefered this over material fracture since I have control over what’s happening if I do it this way. When I dive into material fracture I see all the spiderweb of nodes that make up that tool, panic and get out of that level ASAP).
Now, this is the fun part. I was researching a way of having a custom force pulling upwards and ran into this “force field” node within DOPs. In order to use it, firstly I blocked the overall shape of the UFO beam using a tube. I made sure to have some decent amount of subdivisions because I was gonna need them later.
This is what I got from that vector subtraction. Upward pointing vectors. But also, if you notice, they also go along the surface of the cone. Very appropriate for the rays.
With the help of a “point wrangle”, I can make the velocity larger, or add some twist to the force.
And that’s all (for now). This is how I set this up. I’m planning on adding constraints to this and clearly, there’s gonna be some soil, debris, particles, etc. included with this.