Buffy Style Objects exploding in to dust ?

[andy gee]

Hi everybody

I reckon that this question has been asked a million times before
but i havent asked it so here goes !!

Is there a way of making an object explode in to dust like in buffy the vampire slayer !!

I am thinking that an FX Emitter would do the trick with the object dissolving over time but im not sure ?

Does any body have any ideas ???

Cheers Andy Gee !!!
:confused: :D

[badllarma]

Hi Andy
get youself a copy of issue 38 of 3D world there is an article on how they did that effect in "Strange" (BBC 1 satruday night series)not in Lightwave but there is a few good ideas there also go to www.flay.com and do a search for C4 on the plugins this maybe a jump in the right direction also as you say you going to need FX emitter although some of this may be able to be done in post production instead.

just some thoughts any way;)

andy

[riki]

I seem to recall seeing something about this kind of effect on the LW demo Reel??? Was it something to do ith the making of Blade????

[Elmar Moelzer]

Hello
Yeah Riki, they did that for Blade. Their way of doing it was pretty complicated though.
I had pretty good results doing it with multiple morph- targets and object- dissolves (that was in LW 5.6).
Basic idea:
You can do a bevel and the morph- targets stay in tact (I havent tried that with endomorphs though and I am not sure this would work).
Now you can use the bevel- tool to scale and explode the polygons of the object outwards.
Then simply move everything down (in another morph) and stretch it a bit you can also apply some jitter.
Use an Object- Dissolve- envelope to dissolve the object. Additional particles with hypervoxels will help too.
So this is the exact order:
1. Make a copy of your cahracter, freeze it to get rid of subpatches and to get a fairly dense mesh.
2. Bevel all polygons (no shift and no inset). Hide the polygons and delete everything else (you can also apply a new surface to the newly created polygons (the ones that make the "rim"), so you can select them, with the statistics tool and the delete them.
3. Save the object as explode1 (or whatever).
4. Bevel the object again, but this time add a slight inset and a shift. Delete the resulting polygons again.
5. apply a jitter.
6. Save this object as explode2
7. Move some of the polygons around a bit randomly, apply random bevels if you want to (don forget to delete the "rim"- polygons afterwards). Move and stretch everything downward.
8. Save the object as explode3.
9. Repeate steps 7 and 8 as often as you want (depending on how complex the motion shall look afterwards.

10. In Layout load the original object and apply a dissolve- envelope to it, so you can quickly dissolve it out when the whole things starts (to quickly replace the object with Explode1, wich needs to have a dissolve- envelope into the opposite direction). You could also try to apply an animated clip- map to it, to make the effect i.e start with the head or spread outward from a wound etc.
11. Make an MTSE- morph to morph from explode1 to explode2, explode3 etc...
12. Apply an emitter with hypervoxel- sprites to Explode1 to have some additional dust- effect.
13. dissolve the explode1- object out during the final- morph.
14. Make sure all the morph- targets have different surface- properties (more burned up/dusty the later in the sequence and make them all double- sided) and turn on "Morph Surfaces".
Use Motionblur!

You can also take the original Character smooth- scale it (make it smaller) a bit and create another explode- sequence. so the object looks less hollow.
I also added a skeleton and did the same for it too.

Another nice variation of the effect is to move all the polygons of the morph- objects away a bit from the original object (usually backwards) to give the whole explosion a direction too.
Hope that helps
CU
Elmar

[riki]

Thanks Elmar, I've seen a few threads recently where people have been asking about this FX.