3D World’s question of the month

This issue’s Q&A uses a couple of neat tricks to duplicate a scene not uncommon in anime productions such as Ghost in the Shell and made famous in the spectacular lobby sequence from the first Matrix movie. As a machine gun fires bullets around a room, the impact causes great lumps to be carved in the concrete sending chunks of debris flying around the room and leaving the interior somewhat remodelled at the end of the scene.

There are two parts to this effect. Firstly the chunks of debris that scatter from the impacts and bounce around have to be created from the impact of the ‘bullets’ in the scene. For this we’ll use LightWave’ 3D’s particle system to generate a collision between a particle ‘gun’ and the wall objects, and this will, in turn, create a shower of particles to simulate the debris. These will be rendered with HyperVoxels.

The second part of the effect is to add the holes carved into the walls as the bullets fly. Here we are again indebted to Denis Pontonnier for his Rman Collection of procedural shaders for LightWave 3D. We used his Marker Pen plug-in in a previous LightWave 3D Q&A to animate a quill writing mystical ghostly writing onto a piece of parchment, and here we’ll use the Particle Paint procedural shader to ensure the wall looks suitably smashed after 200 frames of ferocious firing.

Since the last time we looked at the Rman Collection, the shaders have been recompiled into a single LightWave 3D plug-in file, and Denis has also created a nodal version to work with the new nodal shading system in LightWave 3D 9. This will allow us to combine the Particle Paint plug-in with the Nodal Displacements in LightWave 3D 9 to displace the damage into the walls.

Click here to download the support files (26MB)