Fracturing two different material types

[thejamesporter]

Hey guys,

I'm doing a small destruction project and I'd like a bit of advice....

I have a structure which is more or less made of two materials, stone and steel. The steel is the foundation and the stone is the actual 90% of the structure. 

Regarding fracturing/glue constraining this, do I:

• Have two separate Geo for each material or have one merged geo?
• Have separate Voronoi fractures for each material and merge them or have one Voronoi fracture and change the fracturing scale/points based off how the material would fracture?
• The way I want this structure to collapse, I'd prefer to animate my glue constraints. Is this a no-no? Or is there a smarter way (ie, with the increase in velocity, the glue's strength diminishes?)

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

 

Cheers

 

James

[benne5]

Hi James,

Most of the work in destroying stuff in Houdini happens at this stage.  It really comes down to your own artistic choices and what you can get away with.  If you are breaking only one object with only one material then using one mesh works fine.  But if you are destroying something with a variety of materials then I recommend using several different geometry and fracture(boolean, voronoi, etc) set ups.   The benefit of approaching it this was is that you can then adjust each of them to you liking in the simulation stage.  

Deleting glue primitives is a great way to approach something like what you have described.  Look at the controlledGlueBreaking example in the Dynamic examples of the Houdini documentation. 

[thejamesporter]

Thanks for this!! The example file was a big, big help!!!