Getting Started

A few weeks back, I tried my hand at creating desert dunes out of a plane. As part of that same project, this week I’m using the cell fracture addon to destroy some statues. I started off with a couple of characters created in MakeHuman. A couple people on blender.chat mentioned that MakeHuman hadn’t been updated in a while, or wasn’t being actively developed. Regardless, the version I used was super easy to generate a couple of characters to use for statue destruction.

Exporting to Blender

Once you’ve got everything how you want it with your character, it’s time to export. Going from MakeHuman to Blender used to be difficult and require a special plugin and weird file extensions. Now, you can just kick out a simple .DAE file and drop it straight into Blender.

Using the Cell Fracture Addon

Once in Blender, I posed the characters exactly how I wanted them. Once I got the pose, I applied the armature. In edit mode, I separated the parts of the mesh I wanted to fracture. I didn’t want the whole thing, just bits like the hand and shoulders. Next, I fractured using a small number of pieces, around 50. I had to mess with the level of subdivisions and number of pieces to avoid weirdness in complex areas like hands and fingers.

Animating vs Simulating

Typically, I’d simulate the pieces after they’re generated. But for this effect, I wanted a surreal, hyper slow-mo look. For this, I just hand animated the pieces I wanted to break away.