Animate cracking terrain Maya

1. First you need some terrain to crack, you can use your own terrain, or just a flattened cube. To quickly make it look like terrain, I assigned a granite texture with a fractal bump map:



2. Now create a polygon cube and name it fissure. Scale it so that its X and Y values are about half the size of the terrains X and Z values. Make the Z value so it's a thick as you want the crack to be:



3. In the channel box under the inputs section, set the subdivisions Width to 20

4. Now select the ground object and shift select the fissure object. Make sure you are in the polygon menu set and go to mesh > booleans > difference. You should now see something like this:



5. In the outliner, a new object called polySurface1 has appeared, this is a result of the boolean operation, rename it terraindifference.

6. In the outliner, the fissure object now has transform1 parented beneath it. Select it and open the attribute editor and click on the fissureShape tab. In the object display, uncheck intermediate object.

7. Assign a lambert shader to the fissure and set the transparency to white. Make sure wireframe on shaded is on. You should now be able to see the fissure object again:



8. Now you need to move the vertices of the fissure object so it's not so striaght:



9. Now you need to move parts of the fissure object away from the plane, the futher away they are they later the crack will appear there:



10. If you move the fissure object in and out of the plane, you will see the crack forming, keep altering the fissure object untill you get a crack you are happy with.

11. Now move the fissure object all the way out of the terrain and make sure the timeslider is at frame 1. Then press s to set a key. Change the animation length to 100 frames and move to the end of the time slider. Move the fissure object so that the crack is all the way in the terrain:



12. If you play back in the animation you should now see the crack form across the ground. You can still edit the fissure object if you are not happy with the shape of the crack or with the way it forms.

This technique can also be used for many other things, such as animating a bullet creating a hole in a wall or a knife cutting through cake.

Posted in Maya 3D