Spellar Performance: Crush

Community Showcase
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Title: Crush

Student Submission: No

Credits to sourced content:
Megascans (Thanks Epic)
Phase from Paragon (Thanks again Epic)

Screenshot

screenshot.PNG
screenshot.PNG1920Ă—1047 146 KB

Optional

  • Did you use Houdini? Yes
  • Description
    I wanted to make something flashy and explodey and Tried to figure out VAT 3 (I was mostly successful)
  • Engine version: 5
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Here are some gifs of my progress
Spellar_Performance
Spellar_Performance_5

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I used Houdini to do the RBD sims on the missile, it was a fairly simple fracture using the RBD material fracture node and bullet solver with some colliders
Spellar_Performance_Houdini_Sim_2
Spellar_Performance_Houdini_Sim_3
Spellar_Performance_Houdini_Sim_4
For the sim of the missile getting torn apart I used a whole lot of colliders and ran it through an RBD Deform pieces node after the initial sim to give the effect of metal getting torn apart.

Spellar_Performance_Houdini_Sim_1

Then manually moved the pices to give it more motion post sim
Spellar_Performance_Houdini_Sim

for exporting these sims, I used the SideFX labs VAT export, but was getting normal issues when it came time to export the missile that gets torn apart so I used an alembic export for that.

For the explosions I used a mix of Niagara fluids and and Embergen this was pretty straight forward exporting out flipbooks from EG and bringing it into Unreal
Spellar_Performance_Embergen_1
Spellar_Performance_Embergen_2

If anyone wants a further break down of anything I did in my submission let me know

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Greetings @bakednotfried !

Not only is the force field indestructible in Crush, but missiles can be stopped on a dime and utterly obliterated! + 1up :mushroom: on “eplodey”! :exploding_head: LOL!

Thank you for taking us through your development process. It’s really cool to see the individual parts broken down after seeing the whole. What about VAT 3.0 was challenging for you? What led to using VAT 3.0 as opposed to another method of animation?

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The challenging parts of VAT 3.0 I found was probably just that I was new to the workflow and was having some shading issues when it came to importing into UE.
missile issue
Although I only had that prblem for the missile that gets torn apart so I went with an alembic for the last one.
The biggest advantage to VAT3.0 is it’s file size, and playback control. For instance the the alembic cache came out to be about 800Mb compared to 30Mb fore the VAT file.

The other advantage with VAT3.0 is since the frame rate is a material parameter I can directly manipulate the playback rate in sequencer, where as with the Alembic the most control I have is a blanket time scale.

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