SOP Ground Cracking, almost there but i'm facing a specific proble

[Akabane]

SOLVED

I'm creating a ground cracking/crumbling type of effect, so i created a grid, moved around points randomly, created a particle at each primitive center, and i'm moving that with a Bulge SOP, driven by an animated spline with metaball copied all over.

It seems to work, even if I had to make a trick to have the normals orient correctly. Basically i create another plane below the cracking one, merge it with the metaball (converted to poly) and then do the attrTransfer for normals, so that the pieces not affected by the metaball don't flip as they usually do if primitive sop rotation matching is on "match normals" since they will have the plane transferred normals.

Anyway, apart of that trick (if you have a better method please share!) the problem i'm having is that, once I copied the metaball, of course while copying itself, it changes topology, resulting in flickering normals along the already cracked/crumbled pieces of terrain.

Then is when i fall short.

I don't have the slightest idea to make those normals not move as the metaball changes topology (i know, it seems to be oxymorous lol).

I'm starting to think that the metacopy + bulge is not the better method to achieve this.

Any clues?

Here is the flipbook demonstrating the problem.

EDIT: REMOVED

Akabane

Edited April 30, 2010 by Akabane