Project Breakdowns

The Tower

The Tower: Demolition

This project has been one of my most technically involved projects to date. While it started out as an exercise in RBDs and destruction, it became the ultimate test of immense data management, optimization, and pipeline creation.

I began this project by procedurally modeling the tower in Houdini. By building the tower myself, not only did I get the opportunity to create it "brick by brick", but I also got to group the different parts of the tower as I worked, which helped a lot when it came to fracturing later on.

Creating the secondary details on the tower involved a lot of repetitive processes; therefore, I created a few tools to help make them more efficient.

The tools shown above:

The Curvy Bricks Tool: Used to generate a random brick pattern that fits along an input curve. Used primarily for the windows and arches on the tower.
The Brick Boolean Tool: Used to cleanly and efficiently boolean many bricks at the same time. Used to carve out holes for door and windows.
The Vine Generator Tool: Creates a series of noisy curves that minimally intersect with the input geometry. Used to create the vines on the tower.

Having a model made up of several thousand small pieces, I knew that it would be difficult to choreograph the larger actions if I simmed it immediately. Therefore, I decided that the most efficient way to start the simulation process is with a guide sim.

I created a proxy version of the tower, fractured it, and gave it a simple constraint network. Besides hurling the boulder at it, I controlled the destruction of the tower by procedurally animating the deletion of the constraints. My goal was to first get a lot of pieces flying off the initial impact zone, then let the top of the tower fall off, then finish with the rest of the tower crumbling.

With the guide sim in place, I went back to the high-res tower and prepared it for the main simulation.

Because the tower was already in a ton of pieces, it would have been impractical to fracture the whole thing; therefore, I isolated the areas around the main impact zone for fracture. All of the larger pieces also got fractured.

At this stage, the tower was several million polygons and was very hard to work with; therefore, with the geometry finalized, I was able to poly-reduce everything to make it more workable.

From there, I set up clusters based on the pieces from the guide sim geometry, separated the active from inactive geometry, and set up a more complex constraint system.

Additionally, I established several groups of smaller clusters within the large clusters and grouped the bricks that were on the edges of these clusters so that I could easily manipulate their associated constraints during the final crumble.