DMM, the plugin of happiness

Since I started to model stuff in Maya, there was always this little dream in the corner of my mind, this crazy hope that, one day, I'll be good enough to model awesome stuff, and the next minute shatter it all to pieces! It took me a few months to get there, but today I can proudly say that I know how to destroy things in Maya.

 My first try at it was with the DMM plugin of Maya created by Pixelux, in the Pirate project (see previous post), but the plugin limit didn't allowed me to make my destruction look as awesome as I wanted to. However, the render at 300fps of the mast breaking gave me a nice slow motion which created some coolness in the scene anyway.

 Then, after watching a tutorial online, I learned how to destroy a piece of glass thanks to nCloth (by using some rigid settings). Unfortunately, lots of bugs into the scene prevented me to render a good final version. All I can present now is the second half of a bullet shattering a wall of glass.

 

 After that, and after seeing lots of awesome videos made with the purchased version of DMM, I decided to save some money and buy it. And then, my life became as awesome as I expected. I was able to break things into tiny tiny pieces, and I loved it. My first video was just a test of how tiny those pieces could be, and as you can see... well, the result was tiny tiny.

 

 However, pretty long render time (light and glass and tiny pieces aren't very good friends). Then I finally made the video that I wanted to make for months: a bullet hitting a glass. But with a slight change in the result.

 

I had a hard time making the bullet hit the glass in a correct way (strange, I know), so I decided to change the gravity and set it left to right, so technically, the bullet is "falling" on the glass. Really simplified things there. After that I tried to think about some of the best way to shatter a wooden crate, and came up with some interesting results. I played with the Glue setting of DMM, which worked perfectly.

 

 I'm now thinking about destroying a title for my next project. Titles destroyed are always cool