Cloth Fracture

Cloth Fracture RnD

Client: Personal Project
Objective: Attempt to recreate, in an animated format, Tyson Ibele's example of cloth pushing through fractured geometry as seen on the TyFlow website.
Responsibilities: Yikes
Software: 3ds Max, TyFlow, V-Ray, After Effects

Process: After giving it some thought, I came to an assumption that Tyson's example was likely created by first fracturing and simulating the ground and then running a secondary cloth simulation, pushing the cloth through the already cached rigid body simulation.

I began with that approach with promising results, but I wanted to see 2-way interaction between the cloth and debris so the debris would fall back onto the cloth and push against it, as well as, have the cloth push back against the debris, hopefully, lifting it.

The steps I ended up taking were, first, pre-fracture the ground geometry. Next, I imported those chunks into a new TyFlow simulation, converted them to rigid bodies, and bound them together while utilizing clustering. For the cloth, I used a box with high subdivisions on the top surface that lies just beneath the fractured elements and inflated specific portions of it with an animated texture. The bottom of the cloth box is attached to a ground plane to keep it in place and the ground plane also acts as a collision object for the cloth and rigid bodies. I added a PhysX shape (spheres) to the cloth to have proper collisions with the debris but I did not use any PhysX bindings and, in this case, only relied on the cloth bindings, themselves. Substeps were set to 'frame' and PhysX substeps were at 40.

An additional debris simulation was run after the main cloth/rigid body sim to add smaller debris as the rigid bodies break apart. This simulation used Particle Physics for collisions and the previous sim's tyCache as a collision object.

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