Turning a chess piece to dust.

[luke]

Hello,

I have an animation which features two chess pieces. One of them needs to wobble (with fear) and then crumble to dust. Does anybody know a good method to effect the crumbling to dust? I have some ideas but not much time to try them out (as always!) so any help would be appreciated!

[starbase1]

Not sure, but it sounds to me like the hard bit will be making it look like it was solid.

There are plug ins around top fragment down to polys, so how about one of them, combined with filling the object with lots of small hypervoxels? Shink the vertical axis while spreading the horizontal ones may look good...

Nick

[WCameron]

theres a tutorial on doing this somewhere .... Trying to find it
now. I'll post the link when I finally find it...

i think there was also one in the defunct Babylon 5 based
online magazine/website (Beyond Babylon i think it was called...)

I was thinking if you took the original object, super subdivided it
then killed the polys, leaving you with a bunch of points in the shape of your base object, you could disolve the base object slowly to the point object, with hypervoxels with a dust setting
applied to the points, then apply Gravity to the points - but a quick test didnt work on the Gravity bit (Might be doing it wrong though - I havent done much with the ParticleFX stuff ....)

sorry, this might be a bit disjointed, I'm in a rush :-)


- Will.

[SplineGod]

I would try making the chess piece an emitter. Set it to dump a bunch of particles all on one or two frames. At the same time dissolve out the chess piece. Use some gravity and/or wind.

[Capt Lightwave]

I think Tajino did something similar for the Logo Magic tape or whatever from Clickgraphix....

found this little animation to demonstrate...: http://www.tajino.net/movies/logomagic_trailer.avi

Does anyone know where the tape can be found...it doesn't seem to be on the Clickgraphix site as far as I can tell...(www.clickgraphix.com)

[HowardM]

you could use SG_Explosion and Crackit or C4 to break up the piece then crumble it...add an emitter with 'dusty' HVs and youre set!
Something like this but reversed could work....
Flash Animation (http://www.3dink.com/blownup.swf)


...man that Logo Magic tape looks cool

[Hurben]

I think there is a "melt" plugin floating around at Flay.

'Messiah' has is built in, if you have that.