Legos go BOOM ---
 

Howdy all-

I am currently working on a project where I have a scene file of 135 lego pieces (individually modelled), combined to make a Star Wars fighter. Now, I have to animate it, so I was going to have it flying through an asteroid field dodging an attack, later smacking into a large asteroid, sending the 130 pieces flying in all directions.
How can I pull this off? I was thinking I could group all of the pieces together to fly together on a motion path and then when the time comes to break apart, apply dynamics (legos=active, asteroid=passive) and watch them fly. This could really bog down my system and I was curious to know of other methods of making my lego ship explode... Thanks in advance for any tips you all may have for me. =]

hi
 

well there isn't any other alternative for the expolsion...the dynamics system is qiute a handy solution...but one thing u can do though is to bake the dynamics animation afterwards changing them all to key frames....that should speed up ur computer:banana:

Also, there is a "Stand-in" attribute on every rigid body node.

In your case, you could choose the CUBE stand-in, and you should be able to see it all happen in near-real-time:)

Thanks for the replies...

I did a small test run using dynamics and the peices dont come apart (atleast most didn't). I looked into why, and some of the peieces are intersecting... there is no way around this. Maybe I could use shatter? I'm getting a headache. =|

Does the plane just break apart or is there an explosion? Because if there is, you could have a complete Lego plane flying into the asteroid up until it hits. Then you can hide the plane. Timed right, you won't see the plane vanish because of the resulting fireball. Then you could just instance all 130 pieces of the Lego plane onto a particle object and add a filed or to and have watche them fly off. Now if you don't have an explosion... Maybe an odd camera anlgle to hide the switch? Just a suggestion...

:beer:

Or, like you were doing before, with rigids, you could select all of your rigid bricks, and go to FIELDS > RADIAL.

Then, just key the intensity of the radial field to GREATLY increase at the time of impact, thus, pushing (exploding) all of your brick pieces apart in all directions....

Check it out in the docs:)