Apprentice HD

I upgraded to the next version of houdini, apprentice HD, so I could render the particle effects inside houdini. This is my only option at this point, due to my inabilty to export the particle effects to other software programs. This means the final video has to staged inside Houdini as an animation. It could simplify some aspects of the finalisation but it also means I have account for large rendering times.

Problems with Houdini

I started looking at exporting from to other platforms for the final product. It seems that the apprentice version of houdini that I'm running doesn't support the fbx export system, which is the only way of exporting particle system. By doing this I also found out that this version can only render out small renders(720*576) with a houdini watermark. This has been a large set back as I've had to find a way around the exporting of the object and I have find a way to render the particle effects if I cant export them.

Upgrading Houdini to the Master version costs roughly 6 thousand dollars (USD) but is the only option for the particle exporter. My only option is to render the particles and thread them through my video by upgrading to houdini apprentice HD, which allows to me render properly. That will cost me $99 USD which might be difficult for me to pay with my limited budget. At this point I have little choice, and hope it works out.

Physics and particles

Turning objects into particles so far only works on full objects. A shattered object can be disintergrated as well but complications arise when the object is put in the physics engine.

Object to Dust

Going off what Doug suggested I started looking at particles to create a more procedural deconstruction of the object. Disintegration of the object didn't take too long to create and managed to get simple objects breaking into dust reasonably quickly. I may not have a full object with disintegration ready for the progress report document but with this I can show where Iam heading towards.

Shattered obect with Particle

Here I was able to able to apply particles to objects when shattered to mimic dust.

Controlled Model Shatter

I finished my silo model and tried to create a controlled shatter effect. Still somewhat in the testing phase the edges are not as refined as I'd like. To get to this level of control and detail took some time seperating objects and re-fractructing. Getting it perfect will take some time but is very possible.

The image shows the selected breaks ones falling to the ground. I havent added the other parts of the model to the solver but that should be easy.