Beidou Learning Progress (Patreon)

I kinda wanted to give a 'have to work on this' update as well as a sort of 'troubles i'm solving' with the video so you guys get more of an idea of where i'm at.

First, gotta redo all of these roads with a mesh that doesn't do this thing.

Good news is that i'm sort of figuring out a way for meshes to respond to Chaos. This would be immensely useful in the future but I still kinda don't know how it works. It requires convex collision mostly but then the settings are WEIRD. No solvers and no clusters? Like how does any of it hold together for long term?

There's this white thing on all of Beidou's clothing ends. It'd be fine if it wasn't constantly flickering. I might have to redo some of her meshing or figure out what exactly is z-fighting here. I mean I know it's overlapping mesh textures but whhyyyyyy was it set up like this?

The great news is that the wire cutting workflow has gotten much easier. Still a lot of steps for my taste though, but i'm writing them down here anyways.

 . Rig armature 1 way up through the line
. Extend bones down for hanging lanterns.
. Cut mesh and bones at cut area then separate them into own objects/arm
(This avoids the bones adding weights to the wrong side of the cut)
. Apply envelope transform on each mesh to each bone area
. Recombine MESH FIRST then bones
. Then do Gravity Collider and put a weight on the opposite side's box to pin it up
. Then edit the Gravity Collider to rip apart vertices at the cut area THEN make an edge connecting both sides.
(This duplicates the mesh weights on the vertex groups though so gotta edit those to be for each side rather than act as the same vertex messing up where the bones look)
. Have the 2nd side bone copy location of that new duplicated vertex so it actually moves instead of floating in the air
. FINALLY mess with the tension and dampen settings for it to look like it cuts. Might need to move the bones near the cut area so they look together again.

Is this all better than using soft bodies then duplicating a mesh to be pre-cut and swapping them out right when the cut happens and then setting the cache simulation to start right when it happens on the new meshes? Idk, but that sounds like it's a bitch to deal with in other ways too. (Like export compatibility to UE4)

Now for something that's easy and works well. The dirt ground under the road is actually all 1 landscape that's RIGHT underneath the road layer. This is Great! I can make super deep holes or impacts if I want using the landscape tools! This is much better than thinking about how the hell do I destroy the ground in the first place.

Now here's one in I THINK I can solve that. The building got moved forward lately yet the cache still moves it back when the destruction happens. That's just re-destruction at this point.

What I do want to start implementing is manual animation along with the destruction so that these levels fall. This seems to be what TONS of games do like Motorstorm: Apocalypse and Marvels Avengers' bridge scene.

Need to add stuff getting crushed down here and cars backing away. But what I DO know is that tree on the left is getting crushed.

Here's where i'm in uncharted territory. I want this to look damn good but it's just the building pieces that get destroyed. One thing i've learned lately is that most building destruction scenes in movies feature ZERO furniture on the big shot. So I wonder if I just add inside structure if that will be all i'm missing.

For destruction methods, i'm still experimenting. Anchors on each floor? Disbale fields? A BUNCH of force arrows? I know Neko vid had like... 8 arrows of force pointing outwards from the building. It's all so damn ambiguous as to what will work perfect for this or that. But at least i've reached a point where the questions are more detailed instead of like, "Wtf am I doing".

Here is where I REALLY started to learn that a lot goes into the effort for quality destruction in movies. Rebuilding this building on the left was a smart move but as you see the edges of all the destruction look kinda crap. That must be something Houdini handles extremely nicely for its cuts. Also, my cuts were based on optimization rather than building accuracy to save performance. But I DO have cache managers so maybe... maybe I should make the building destruction happen in its own level and then bring that level back into the main one? That would save a ton of editing performance with 1 hide button as well as being able to cache everything that happens in its own space.
Right now, ALL of the destruction and assets are on the same map. I might have to change that for the future if I do more than 3 buildings like I plan to. This easily tanks performance. Especially with raytracing on, damn. I'm impressed I got this far with destruction when that sucker is on!

Either way, i'll have to fill in the inside with pre-destroyed assets so that looks good too. Thankfully I bought a kit that's ALLL about that.