Giganta Destruction Behind the Scenes (Patreon)

Wanted to do a bit of behind the scenes on this one because of all the destruction and as a note for the future on what works and what doesn't.

So first of all, I hate the ground view lighting. It's very flat and the colors pop only at building height. Working on changing that for the final release. But now what's interesting is the destruction here. 

So the road was created in blocks in the demo map I used. So it was easy to use Apex fracturing to crack it into a bunch of small pieces. Unfortunately, something happened where this road is much darker than the non-destructive roads.
There's a few elements to ground destruction. You need:
. THICK cube road rectangle and NOT flat road
. A ground of rubble underneath
. Collision boxes that rise on the outside and sink on the inside.
(Although I noticed in Pacific Rim that they dropped the center of the road in footsteps and everything flew up and out from underneath somehow. Houdini Fx stuff I don't know.
Some people do great stomps in games using Niagara fx that even include making the ground look destroyed. Fuckin' magic to me.

I wanted to keep the destructive road stuff going so there's a few more awesome steps here in the distance with the exact same setup. Road gets destroyed as the ground/collision underneath lift up and the collision attached to Giganta's boot sink into it.

This flat plane is actually the same thing copied around under other roads and is a landscape object. It's really flattened on the z-axis but the premade bumps and hills I added to it appear by scaling vertically up again.

It's a great effect for beginning and is thankfully easy to accomplish on this map because of the block-built roads. Obviously, if I want to do this in the future, I gotta figure out making roads into thicker cubes as well as converting splines into meshes for fracturing. And man that right foot looks bad but thankfully we don't see that as the camera is in the building.

Here, the smoke effects were activated at the same time as the destruction rather than being attached to pieces fracturing. Well it does both, but all the smoke went downwards. Anyways, this looks pretty good, honestly. Might apply more smoke fx activating at the same time to make destruction more impactful. Obviously doesn't look as good as simulated smoke but that's something to look into.

This I feel is where my laziness and first mistakes are with destruction. I always feared that I'd have to rebuild the building but with more detail put into how it's made so I tried cutting it up basically in Blender and then I'd let Apex edges fill in the rest.
Result came out like crap. It's fine in this vid because the focus isn't on this building's pieces coming apart too much. But future vids  are gonna require practice remaking a "game-ready" building in Blender and then maybe fracturing it in Physx, then either putting it in UE4 or back to Blender if possible. Not being able to cache destruction in UE4 is a MASSIVE problem because each render has a bit of luck to question just what will happen with the destruction. The problem with putting it in Blender? SLOWS THE PROJECT DOWN SO BAD. I'd have to simulate the destruction with practically everything hidden and wait for a bake before hopefully showing everything else again. All because I can't figure out recording what happens to Apex destruction in UE4. Chaos destruction won't have this problem in the future.

So this video was written with zero lines for Wonder Woman because she has ZERO facial expressions on the model. Yes, I know i'm a dumbass for picking a model and animating it without checking for bones or shapekeys on the face. But a HUGE improvement in this scene is how Giganta grows. Beforehand, it was a really BORING stance of control with smooth growth. Growth as the most boring part of my video? NOT IN THIS HOUSE! So I completely re-animated it to be much more angrier as she aggressively gets bigger and demands more space.

The destruction at the bottom right of this scene actually happened offscreen when she stomps down to grow, but it adds a lot of flavor here to me seeing that a bit later. I also have some of the same ground destruction going on here for the concrete. Came out better than expected, really. This time the ground collision slowly inches towards the edge as the ground lifts up and slides with it.

I need to adjust this Obelisk for the umpteenth time. The destruction here should be good instead of solid but there were issues I'm still having with it...

So the obelisk destroyed pieces keep freezing in mid-air for no reason at all. I'm completely confused by it but if only I could record what happens to it, then it wouldn't feel like i'm overloading Apex destruction or something as it freezes itself. Idk, everything else seems to work perfectly fine.

While this picture doesn't make sense, it looks better in motion with the tree getting kicked down as the wall goes flying away from another invisible collision box.

This came out just great. This is when I first tried the whole thing with the ground coming up after getting destroyed. I also had to adjust the gravity of the level to be WAY higher because these rocks got hit so hard they flew to space! (I love stuff that just goes flying though so I kept that up. But of course, making this look more severe lost the subtle cracking from Chaos... but this is more satisfying.

I tried pulling off the same thing in the background but for some reason, it doesn't want to fly everything up like the previous time. Still looks pretty good though!

Meanwhile this destruction looks fucking terrible on the outside. It will do for now as the weakest part of my video because I don't want to spend another month recreating this building. But I will make up for this basic cracking by using more smoke effects like the building top and adding more office stuff falling down with the inner floors. This building kinda just shits out its floors and that's kinda funny. Building cracks a bit and all the floors just give way!

But THIS came out as I hoped! Missing the walls between desks though because Apex destruction just went fuckin' nuts and yet another reason for it to be recorded. 

This was done by taking all the objects, slightly raising them off the floor, then dropping them at a really steep angle. UE4 CAN record objects that are simple physics because it records their transforms. This was GREAT because I could then save it in its own sequence and add it to the main sequence. The trickiest part was parenting all the recorded physics to something and moving them into place. I had to convert the sequence spawned items to possessable so that they'd stay in the project outliner instead of spawning only when the sequence started. This allowed me to parent the objects to a cube and then move the cube into the correct place. For some reason, the cube moved to the world origin point instead of staying in a nice spot to move from. So it was tricky to get the objects to be put into place and then parented to the falling building. Looks GREAT though! Based it on WW's location.

Here I want a shitload of particles to spawn. You can see I adjusted the camera to obviously block the shot of seeing the building that gets hit. This is because that front building piece crashed UE4 every single time I tried to crack it. Even further proof that proper building destruction requires parts put together that are pre-fractured rather than fracturing the whole thing at once. *sigh... at least now I know.
Funny thing, I couldn't get smoke fx to show up on the fractured pieces of destruction for awhile and gave up. In order to see this smoke in a much thicker manner, I raised the opacity of the instance it came from. Suddenly the smoke for everything else was visible!

Now I LOVE this shot. It came out great. I wanted a similar thing to how a serial killer drags their weapon on the ground but it's for Giganta lifting her back foot by dragging it on the ground. You only get this kinda stuff with villain characters, man.

Ground and brick walls are Apex, Machines in front and barrels were physics, and the trees and light pole that fell over are manually animated. Who knew all this stuff would have to combine together to create a better destructive scene! On top of that, I want a bunch of particle fx in the air raining down here from how hard Giganta destroyed this building.

I plan to cover up all this shoddy Blender cutting with higher quality rubble but something tells me I won't be able to affect the scene too much.

Huh. Actually, I made shape keys for the inner building levels to bend downwards and that's missing here. Good catch self! Thanks! Don't forget adding rubble on the left side!

Despite some failures, I'd say that this was a successful first try at getting actually pretty damn destructive. I can begin to get more detailed in future projects to be where I want it to be but this is good enough for now. What's great is that it's all done in one take! But I fear yet again that not being able to record Apex destruction happening with no tutorials online to do so will leave me going back to Blender somehow. I just hope I can fracture using Physx lab still. Really powerful destruction tools.
One of the most important things I learned here is that the better you create an object/building, the better it gets destroyed. There are no shortcuts here and I've still yet to add like little particle fx rubble flying around from the destruction and simulated smoke. But one step at a time at each project. I spent a long time just trying to get something to work with Chaos but it wasn't ready yet in terms of slideshow performance. Something tells me the results would've looked slightly better, but the techniques for how the objects were destroyed would still look kinda bad.
It's all about no-shortcut techniques here. How something is built and how detailed the fractures are based on what the person is expecting. Then adding the smaller smoke and particles for polish.

Edit: It looks like Blender doesn't import physx stuff and has its own thing with Cell Fracture add-on.  *Sigh. Another thing to learn. This would completely change my workflow yet again on destruction. I guess I better prepare for maybe a separate Blender project focused only on destroying the remade building where I guess I import only the animated balls and cubes that are attached to characters? Idk. Seems a bit too roundabout but I might learn something on performance saving.

It seems that if I wanna do this right, it's Blender vs Houdini simulation. Blender could be WAY easier to learn vs Houdini's cinematic control. Man, this is gonna suck. But I will try to find the most straightforward path through and Blender is most likely the cheapest way for that at least. I'll retry Blender before going through Houdini learning hell.