For my final project in Visual Effects class, I set out to complete simulation in Maya using "Soft Bodies". Soft bodies are geometric objects in Maya that have been manipulated to be flexible objects. They can bend, ripple, bulge, and more. Soft bodies can be used to make a mesh move towards a goal object, deform and distort the mesh with springs, and to emit nParticles from the surface of a mesh.
For my project, I decided to simulate meteors striking the ground near a city. Some of the meteors will strike the ground and the ground will absorb the impact. Others will hit a force field that protects the city and bounce away. I also wanted the force field to ripple upon the impact. Here is a quick summarization for what I had planned.
I set out by creating the environment for the scene first. I made the ground and the shield soft bodies and then created a particle emitter for the meteors. Once I had the particles resembling the appearance and physical attributes of meteors, I made them collide with the shield mesh. This way the particles would bounce off and ricochet from the surface of the shield. Here is a motion test I completed before rendering to test all of the attributes.
Once I was happy with the results of the soft bodies, I cached them. This allows Maya to store their movement in the XYZ space. Once it has the cache, it can simply replay the simulation and not have to compute it again on every play-through. It also helps with the rendering process. After that, I rendered the scene out using Mental Ray in Maya 2016. Here is the final render.
Overall, this project was a great introduction to soft bodies in Maya. I look forward to learning more in the future.
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