pretty much the subject gives everything. I have two worrior characters animated using mocap, fighting with mace, sword and wooden shields. I want the shield to brake when the mace come in contact with it. The shield is prefractured and I want it to break only in the area where the mace will hit.

The solution I came is to make the shield RBD Glue object and enable deforming geometry, also I use an active value node in order to avoid gravity to the pieces that are not in contact with the mace but in the problem is that I want to create a dynamic group with the pieces that are coming in contact. In the details view I found that when ever there is a contact to any piece, there is a new value “impact” for each one of them. How can I use this in order to create the group?

If there is any other way that you know or think will do the job please let me know.

cheers

Even if you get this working, what's going to happen to a shield that is hit in the middle? The middle will drop out and the two sides will be suspended in air.

However, if you can live with this, use an attribute transfer to transfer colour from the mace to the shields. Then set a glue impulse in DOPs by reading the point colour and triggering a break.

I can post an example if you need it.

thanks mrCatfish for your reply, I think I have somewhere an example scene which does what you say in the shop level but I am not sure and if its not much trouble for you to post here a simple .hip file, that would be really appreciated.

But i am wondering there is no way to use the impact values in the dops?

Here is the example file. It shows both a triggered breaking and the inheriting of velocity from source geo. I had help from SESI on figuring this out a while back, (this should be an example file).

To me this seems a better way to go, because doing the grouping in DOPs, you will have to register an impact, and you won't be able to “break” things until the next time-step, (I suspect).

Again thanks mrCatfish for the example files, it seems a bit complex (especially in the bones) so I am going through the networks and I may be back with quenstions if thats ok with you.