July 8, 2011

In this hour-long series of six free video tutorials, you’ll learn to animate the breakage of an object in Maya. We use the Shatter Effect, Rigid Body dynamics, and animated Visibility to achieve the illusion of an object shattering on impact.

This is an intermediate level exercise, building on the previous Catapult tutorial. Some of the learning outcomes of this tutorial include:

Model the shards of a broken object
Animate the initial movement with keyframes
Switch dynamics on at a certain time
Push rigid bodies in a desired direction
Fine-tune rigid body and solver attributes
Bake the simulation to keyframes
Toggle visibility to achieve “object substitution”
Render a preview animation

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