How to make a building crumble?
by Jason Gossiaux · in Torque Game Engine · 04/18/2008 (9:25 pm) · 4 replies
So I've become pretty familiar with model animation and all that, but lately I've started to think about how to have my buildings get destroyed.
In my game I'll be using DIFs for buildings but this could just as easily apply to DTS shape buildings like the kind used in most RTS games. As the building takes damage it is pretty easy to add flames, smoke and the possibility exists for swapping the textures to reflect the damage its taken.
But how could you actually animate it falling to pieces? I was thinking of swapping the DIF building with a DTS shape that looks similar, and then having it animate falling apart. I don't need realistic physics and the like, I just want a canned, pre generated falling apart animation... but I'm not sure how you'd do such a thing. Torque seems to use bones for its animations and doesn't lend itself to multipart animations I don't think right?
Well, I'm just doing some brainstorming on how to accomplish this. Barring all else I'll just do the texture swapping/fire/smoke and when the building does go boom I'll have a massive cloud of dust pop up as the building earthquake shakes into the ground and out of existance :P
In my game I'll be using DIFs for buildings but this could just as easily apply to DTS shape buildings like the kind used in most RTS games. As the building takes damage it is pretty easy to add flames, smoke and the possibility exists for swapping the textures to reflect the damage its taken.
But how could you actually animate it falling to pieces? I was thinking of swapping the DIF building with a DTS shape that looks similar, and then having it animate falling apart. I don't need realistic physics and the like, I just want a canned, pre generated falling apart animation... but I'm not sure how you'd do such a thing. Torque seems to use bones for its animations and doesn't lend itself to multipart animations I don't think right?
Well, I'm just doing some brainstorming on how to accomplish this. Barring all else I'll just do the texture swapping/fire/smoke and when the building does go boom I'll have a massive cloud of dust pop up as the building earthquake shakes into the ground and out of existance :P
About the author
#2
04/19/2008 (9:23 am)
Yeah but how do you do an animation where pieces and parts go crumbling? From what I can tell you always have a skeleton and the mesh is bent and twisted around it. So I could have a building spaghetti collapse but not break apart. Does that make sense? Perhaps I'm just missing something obvious here :P 
#3
04/19/2008 (9:28 am)
Actually you are.. Ever play tribes? or even better.. in its simplest form.. See the projectile, thats a dts model that gets destroyed and plays smoke. basically animating it collapse in on itself isnt as hard as you might think. You simply create the collapsed model and when it calls on death, you replace is with the collapsed model and have the debris as the crossbow explosion. Only instead of a projectile, your making a stationary object, a good example of this.. is the explosive barrels in the FX pack. might be a goodplace to start. and scale up from there. 
#4
04/19/2008 (11:34 am)
If the parts of your building are not connected by geometry in the dts, they can break apart. If you use a ShapeBase for the object, it can keep track of damage, too. 
Torque 3D Owner Edward