Hi there, this is my first posting on here, and i'm still a massive amateur with houdini, and i'm having a problem….

I have modelled a lego car, with all the little bits making up the car as you'd expect from a Lego car. I want to animate it racing down a road, then crashing into a boulder, and exploding, so all the individual pieces come apart, then i want to animate the pieces rebuilding in to two seperate Lego bikes, and then have them drive off down the road.

Is there a simple way to animate the explosion and rebuilding bit, cos it's sooo complicated at the moment with loads of pieces, and it'd take forever to keyframe each one moving away then comign back together.

Also, can someone please tell what the best possible PC spec you could have to run Houdini and any other good CG software on? My computer is really good(i thought) but is seriously struggling with my car/bike thing…

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Perhaps this would give you a start:
http://odforce.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=1597 [odforce.net]

Sorry mate, that link worked but it only goes to a forum topic where there are loads of ‘Happy Christmas’ messeges. THere is a link on the topic, but it doesn't work…….

Dual opterons rock, if you have the cash. Even good with cheap Geforce graphics card, like 5700

i think edward was more so pointing to franks lego stones OTL. check out his vids and download the zip there and see where you go from that.

OOps..sorry guys/gals, didn't notice the Lego thing on that link…One small problem now –> i have no idea what a .OTL file is or how to view it. I tried houdini, and that didn't work, adn triewd searching for it on the internet, but to no success….sorry to be a pain in the rear-end!

An .otl file is a Houdini Digital Asset. To install, go to File -> Install Operator Type Library…, click on the “+” button to find the .otl you downloaded & click Accept. If you want the Digital Asset always, change the “Install Library To:” parameter to “$HOME/houdini7”.

Cheers!
steven

ok i'm feeling slightly retarded! Thanks for the info, but now i'm getting a messege saying ‘Library installation:failed, cehck file permissions’, but the file permissions are fine as far as i can see. I have read, read, execute on it.

Cheers.

OK, nevermind, got it to work….thing is, i already have all my lego bricks and the car modelled, but i now need to explode it and i was wondering if there was an easy way to do it?

check out this old tutorial…
http://www.sidefx.com/community/learn/effects/legacy/breaking_ice.pdf [sidefx.com]


but it would be better to go through all the tutorials to better understand Houdini…that will make things easy

Perhaps I can help (it was me, who animated that lego short)
First, The otl doesn't support the crash, that you see in the video. Therefor I took the points, that describe the positions of the lego stones (I used instances to render them) and converteted them into a particle system. Then when Santa was falling down, he took a force field with him, that blasted the stones away. They collided with the floor and an interaction-POP kept them from penetrating themself. I don't know how your car does look like. Perhaps you will need a better collission detection, which would compilicate some things. Also you mention, that you have already built the car. It could help, if you describe, how you have done that. I ask only, because if you want to explode the car, you need the stones separated from each other. They need to move independently.

Thanks a lot…I've got it sorted now…did what you said and it worked a treat…maybe someday when i'm a chief animator at pixar i can return the favour!! :roll: