Still working on a handful of shots right now, but here’s what I have so far. I learned a TON of new stuff with this project and had a blast!
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Particle Systems And Rigid Bodies
Update on the “Never Forgotten” series animation! I’ve since shifted from the desert sands and dunes into a more abstract ‘title sequence’ type vibe. For this section, I’m using particle systems and smoke simulations 100 percent of the time. Starting to get some of the shots back from the render machine, and they’re looking pretty cool! Hoping to get everything buttoned up in the next week or two.
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Using the Cell Fracture Addon to Destroy Statues
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.
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Blender Smoke Simulation: Creating Windblown Dunes
Shoutout to @loranozor for requesting this walkthrough! I don’t do a blender smoke simulation every day, but one of the biggest takeaways that I got from learning my way through this project was the difference between the resolution divisions of the smoke domain and the resolution divisions under the “high resolution” checkbox.
Smoke Domain Resolution
Basically, as I understand it, the resolution of the smoke domain defines how many voxels are used in the simulation. The higher the voxel count, the more accurate the main body of smoke. Use domain resolution to shape the main look of your smoke sim. If I’m not mistaken, I believe the little cube in the corner of your smoke domain helps you visualize the size of a single voxel, so you can get rough idea of your simulation scale before you even bake it.
“High Resolution” Divisions
Once you’ve got the main shape and behavior of your simulation looking the way you want it, it’s time to enable the “high resolution” checkbox. This is essentially like applying the subsurf modifier to your smoke. It keeps it’s main general shape and behavior, but the high resolution divisions add that extra little bit of “whispiness” for added realism and resolution.
If you’re interested in learning more about blender smoke simulation, check out Mantaflow. It’s a great branch of blender pushing the boundaries of smoke and fluid sims!