Brighid Destruction Physics Test (Patreon)

Edit: I hate how youtube breaks embedded videos for unlisted stuff until you click to watch it on their site.

This video is a sleeper hard mode, man. Everything in it is at the final part of Makoto vid part 4 that stopped me. (Except turning wheels)

But I finally have a comfortable flow through RBD Labs in Blender! The ONLY issue I have now is that the fracturing process deletes parts of the objects. Which is why the roofs of the buildings are already torn up. I've opted to just say fuck it. Fuck fixing all that after hours of it not working and instead, in the future, I will mesh swap the perfect model into the pre-destroyed Blender animation upon impact.
Everyone already does that and it works amazingly!

Lastly, MAKE DAMN SURE that when parenting the destruction objects to the armature with a shift select drop in the Blender outliner, THAT THE ARMATURE NAME is changed! It took me days to figure out that having the armature named "Armature" was breaking the destruction import process into UE5 so that every piece was its own mesh because I already had other armatures named that!

Another useful thing not shown here in RBD Labs is that you can highlight areas of destruction to be keyframed WHEN their physics turn on. This is insanely useful if you have a staircase that's all connected but needs to be progressively destroyed upwards. *cough

Now off of Blender and on to UE5.

The destroyed "hovels" (open house things) here are pre-done in Blender, but the smaller objects on them are all simply clicked, added physics with a toggle, then turned start awake off. To my surprise, you can increase mass and slowdown how it reacts to physics for each object or multiple selections all at once.This shit is just fantastic. Same for the huge balls that acted as collision for it all.
An important aspect about collision is that NOT having it simply be a remake of Brighid's body allows you to control where the objects fly. If everything was perfectly remade, those hovels would go flying upwards because of the shape of her boot. But instead I used flat walls aimed downwards in Blender.

I've been trying to use Fluidninja more, but I need to stop discounting the fx I already have. I should just learn the marketplace fx I have, then Fluidninja will slowly creep up to replace them. That way i'm not spinning my wheels for weeks trying to reinvent the wheel in an fx plugin that's completely separate in how it works from Niagara. Plus, i've learned that proper fx are done in layers instead of 1 thing handling everything.
Like the fire could be regular particle fx, the embers a part of it, but then the smoke if Fluidninja that I will learn one day on how to get it to react to the particle fire.
Then a final touch of having a point light there to act as the emissive for the fire.

It's THIS kind of thinking that has tripped me up for years with vfx. Layer things up separately and fake where people think things would happen.