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

Pirate Final Project Post 3 - Rendering

No surprise: rendering took forever. But less than it could have. We decided to use the preset of physical sun and sky instead of looking for a very realistic render, and that way save some render time. This render is enough for a class project, and all that we could do in the amount of time we were given. But some shots took way longer than others to render. The firing cannons for example, because of the smoke. Or just the breaking mast using DMM, that I exported at 300 frames per second for having a nice slow motion. And the ocean is just the preset offered by Maya, which looks good enough for what we were aiming for.

Pirate Final Project Post 2 - More Modeling

Here comes some assets I have created for the project. The renders are made with mental ray.

Pirate Final Project Post 1 - Modeling

The semester, my final project is going to be a fake trailer for a pirate movie (pirate of the Caribbean style). This is a group project, so with my two classmates, we plan to shoot some footage on green screen and place it in a 3D model, use some Ncloth animations for the sails and flag, some 3D Fluid for a burning boat and canons firing, and the DMM plugin for a cracking mast. But first, I had to model the boat. Here comes the evolution of that assignment (it took a week to model).

Projection Mapping

This month assignment was pretty cool.

 We've learned the basic of projection mapping, and had to choose a picture and make our own. When we watched our instructor doing it, it looked so easy. Of course, the reality of it is very different...

 I choose a picture i've taken from downtown austin, because there wasn't much people or cars. I cleaned it a bit on photoshop, taking out stop lights and passer-by.

Downtown Austin

Ok, now basically the idea was to recreate that scene in 3D. Now here is a good tip: you want to do a good projection mapping? CHOOSE A PICTURE WITH CUBIC BUILDINGS, DAMN YOU! Seriously, do you see those two buildings in the back? I was thinking "meh, it's gonna be fine, I'll just have to recreate them", well, I'll tell you what: this was one of my stupidest moment in 3D.

I don't know what smoked the architect who built that building, but it's not cubic, it's not piramidal, it's not triangular or rectangular, but it's everything at the same time! Aaaah! Every time I passed in front of it in the bus during the month, I tried to figure out it's logic, but no! Too complex! DO NOT DO A PROJECTION MAPPING IN A BUILDING LIKE THIS! Or if you do, take pictures of it under every angle, and recreate it as close as possible.

 Anyway, moving on. After modeling the scene, I projected the picture onto the 3d elements, and with a camera was then able to move into the scene. Ok, it's the very short version, it's actually more complexe.

 Because I had issues with the horizon line, I decided to hide it with some fog created thanks to maya fluid. There is still some issues, but overall for a first try, I'm pretty happy. Now I want to try again, but this time with cubes. Gosh, it's gonna be so easy...

 

UT Flag with NCloth

It's been a while I wanted to try NCloth in Maya, so as a true Longhorn fan I decided to create a little flag. But a war flag, you know. Because they are cooler.

UT flag Maya from Vincent Desgrippes on Vimeo.

DMM breaking table in Maya

I was playing around in Maya with the DMM plug-in and came up with that result. Just frustrated the plug-in's limit is that low, and that we need to spend 300 dollars to be able to fully use that wonderful tool of destruction.