Shatter test

One very important asset that I will need to include in my animation to make as believable as possible is debris and rubble etc. Something that can easily be overlooked but with devastating repercussions to the visual aesthetic leaving a feeling of bareness or blandness.

I started my research by investigating how people were taking this asset, this brought me to a tutorial video on how to model debris, it sounded perfect! so I took a look

I thought it was a very interesting method in which to achieve this so I embarked on my test.

Starting with a simple cube just to get the method down. The method is to apply a shatter effect to an object, in our case a cube.

I wanted to start the attributes of the shatter low as to understand how the process works and to check everything goes right. I encountered one issue and that is that the object being shattered needs all of its history deleted, so this just means the whole object has to be completely modelled. 

Then I started ramping it up a bit, these are the attributes for the shatter that I found gave the right look for this test.

But I wanted to test it to its limits to see what the extremes are in case future endeavours require a certain look. It turns out I went above its limits as maximising the attributes causes a fatal error crash!

As the debris and rubble will be featured in my animation I needed to see how it would work in the environment so whipped together a quick floor and building to place the debris next to for referencing.

Due to me saving the UV snapshot of the building at a very small size, when I edited it with a texture ontop it came out horribly, this made me think more carefully about saving snapshots, to save them at a larger size to get a better resolution when plugging them back in.

Also I realised that instead of looking for rock textures it would be more realistic if the debris was more coloured towards the bricks used in Leeds. using this photo as reference:

This type of building wouldn't produce grey 'rocky' debris. so I just changed the diffuse to a more red brick looking texture.

The next thing I wanted to include was a higher res texture for the building and a ground texture in the form of a road.

I decided to make a quick render!

Through that tutorial video mentioned at the beginning I learnt how to quickly edit an image to achieve a simple bump map, this was achieved by turning the image monochrome and then adjusting the levels to reduce the amount of variation in the low-lights and high-lights, here is an example of a bump map

This was for the building.

I then realised that there are very small shadows protruding from the grass in the floor UV, this made me realise the possible situations this could cause when using photos as textures, the lighting would have to adopt the lighting in the image which isn't ideal.

even after adjusting the lighting in the scene I realised that the shadows would still be there where if that was in the real world the shadows would be snuffed out by the looming shadow of the building. this small epiphany will help avoid some difficulties in the future as it has taught me how to search for the right textures or how to shoot the right textures taking everything into account from the story board such as lighting in relation to camera angles.

I also tried selecting the shards from the shatter and scaling them individually rather than as a group so they would keep their position but scale together to merge into one piece.

I then used another small shatter with a value of 2 shard count on a beam like object to achieve a sort of broken wooden beam look to add to the debris 

As you can see here I've also edited the UV of the floor some more to add more ground debris to add a more believable effect instead of looking like the debris should be there.

And finally I tried scaling the shards as the above photos look more like a rockery or display of rocks rather than a clump of rubble, this made the scene look better and has confirmed that it was the right thing to do.

Over all I am very happy with this test, it has shown me quite a quick and efficient was of creating debris, obviously I would put more effort into the UV maps and using different models to shatter so we aren't left with horrible straight sides to certain pieces of rubble. I would also use a different texture due to it looking very out of place but this was due to me just applying the same texture to each piece, I will be using various textures for more variety in future scenes. also the way that the image was compressed has adjusted the colour of the rubble to a much more orange hue which almost made me sick, so I will look into the compression of images in Maya.