Megaton

Megaton is designed for the destruction of objects. Its highly interactive design greatly reduces the time needed to develop totally unique blast scenarios. Megaton provides animators with the ability to test a multitude of destruction scenarios, and quickly make adjustments to any part of the simulation. Combining performance and flexibility makes Megaton the ideal solution for creating highly dynamic disintegration or deformation animation with a minimum of time and effort.

Megaton combines all the tools necessary to create stunning demolition effects.

Slabs

Slabs are the direct conversion of NURBS surfaces into meshes and contain the following properties:

• Hard slabs do not bend, and will break apart in a brittle manner like brick, ceramic, or glass.
• Soft slabs will bend and deform similar to metal or plastic, and will tear apart.
• Fragmentation of slabs is achieved by applying random or custom crack patterns. Random patterns are achieved through texture maps, while custom crack patterns are hand drawn.
• Includes built in brick fracture algorithm.
• Easily adjustable texture UV coordinates.
• Slabs can contain simple polygons that are derived from the outlines of all the fragments, or can be evenly quadrangulated for smoother higher precision meshes.

Slab Topology

Slab Topology is the manipulation of the slab faces using texture maps. They work in a similar fashion to displacement maps, and can be controlled by any control surface. Two different maps are used for before and after topology. Inner and outer edge faces can also be sub divided, beveled, and manipulated using ramps.

Sweeps

Sweeps are fracturable extrusions and are used to create boards, pipe, wire, or any other swept surface. They contain the following properties:

• Created by extruding a NURBS profile curve along a path curve.
• Easily adjustable texture UV coordinates.
• Sweeps can bend away from control surfaces or lie on top.
• Capable of animated recoil after snapping apart.
• Adjustable surface sub-division to help create smoother bends or extra fracture points.
• Random fracture cuts or specific first, second, and third cuts.

Glue Objects

Glue Objects are used to attach additional geometry to a blast control surface. They can consist of ornaments, additional debris or set dressings. Glue Objects are also used with mesh models that are not easily converted to NURBS. In this case, pre-fractured parts of a model can be attached to a control surface to simplify their animation. Glue Objects contain the following properties:

• Can be mesh or NURBS objects
• Capable of taking advantage of both the particle and rigid body solvers.
• Can be adjusted or moved at any time.

Explosives

Use virtual explosives to deform and break your models. Explosives can be easily adjusted to mimic any kind of force. Adjust blast shape, magnitude, velocity, area of impact and optional shooter location. Explosive placement can also be animated to produce collisions between models. Use the machine gun option to quickly pulverize your models with multiple blasts. Advanced users can create their own blast pressure graphs for more complex blast shapes. Surface vibration can also be achieved using built-in noise and oscillator functions.

Damage and Debris Meshes

Megaton simplifies blast scenario manipulation by producing only three geometry meshes for every destroyed surface.

• Damage geometry consisting of the model prior to demolition and what remains after demolition.
• Debris geometry which gets blasted away during demolition.
• Secondary debris geometry which consists of additional smaller fragments.

Complex Surfaces

Megaton can create layered surfaces consisting of different kinds of materials. For example, a wall section can be created with stucco, wood-frame, and drywall layers. All layers will automatically react to explosives as a single surface. Yet each layer responds according to its prescribed material type. Note that the framing layer in this case is found in the "Megaton" package.

Surface Cracking

Built-in cracking algorithm. Using Megaton's highly advanced cracking algorithm, animators can quickly create an infinite number of crack patterns by simply drawing surface cracks or by using texture maps. Fast interaction allows for the fluent testing and adjustment of many different crack patterns.

Debris Solving

Debris solving is achieved using either a high-speed particle based solver or a high-accuracy rigid body solver. Interactively create your blast scenario using the high-speed solver and then record your animation using the high-accuracy rigid body solver. Megaton uses Ageia's Novodex rigid body solver. Additionally, Megaton contains an advanced rigid body inter-penetration avoidance system for improved solver performance.

Recording (Baking Simulation)

Blast scenarios can be recorded to disk at any time. Recording simulations provides many key benefits.

• Playback is much faster because scenes have already been calculated during the simulation phase.
• Scene size can be greatly reduced by removing the Blast Code engine.
• Scenes can be played forwards or backwards.
• Motion blur can be added during rendering.
• Scenes can be viewed on machines not licensed to use Megaton by using the free playback plug-in.
• Multiple simulation recordings can be viewed without reloading the scene.

Shading

Megaton facilitates shading geometry. All output geometry contains pre-computed UV coordinates to simplify shading. Texture reference meshes are also attached to all geometry for projection or 3D texture mapping. Component maps for front, back, and side geometry are also output for multiple shader attachments.

Rendering

Blast Code can adjust the resolution of all output geometry for level of detail requirements. Output high-resolution models consisting entirely of quads and triangles for precise texture and displacement mapping, or low-resolution models for hardware rendering. All recorded blast scenarios are capable of motion blur.

Particles

Built-in particle emitters are used for additional dust, smoke, or fire. Debris meshes are capable of surface particle emission using all of Maya's standard particle emission attributes, including those normally reserved for NURBS surfaces. Additional controls specifically designed for demolition have also been added. Debris emitters, include particle emission fall-off based on debris flight time or impacts with other surfaces.

Timing

Recorded Animation is capable of time stretched or compressed playback. Adjusting playback speed creates realistic movement of different scaled geometry without the need to adjust the original blast sequence.