Hi,

I'd like to drop text from above a ground plane and have it smash into chunks with thickness. I'm very new to Houdini and I can't find out how to achieve this.

Surely someone knows how to do this???

Have a look at these tutorials:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=865&Itemid=132 [sidefx.com] and http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=611&Itemid=132 [sidefx.com]

Or try the Font SOP, an Extrude SOP, a Shatter SOP and then the RBD fracture from the toolbar.

When I do what you suggested. Shatter explodes the text in the centre & i'm not sure how to fix it.

Thanks for the suggestion though

Hi,

You might also want to check out this post [sidefx.com] to see how Glendaloch shatters the text.

Good luck!

Cheers!
steven

I read that post. Thanks. It still doesn't help me cut up my geo inside houdini and shatter the text. I guess it can't be done.

A lot of the polygon geometries are not joined at the edges by default–they're only snapped together and not actually one piece. You need to add a Facet node (inside your font_object1) and turn on Consolidate… option on that node to turn the text model into one piece, then use the Shatter tool. You'll get better pre-fracture results that way.

Could someone please look at my file to see what the shatter is doing to my object. I just want it to smash onto a ground plane and break into thick chunks.

IndyZoneCo
A lot of the polygon geometries are not joined at the edges by default–they're only snapped together and not actually one piece. You need to add a Facet node (inside your font_object1) and turn on Consolidate… option on that node to turn the text model into one piece, then use the Shatter tool. You'll get better pre-fracture results that way.

That looks good. Is it done with actual text? Can you let me look at the .hip file?

After using Shatter, you need to send your shattered geometry into DOPs (Dynamics OPerators) context and add a ground plane for any actually shattering to happen. You can do all that with the Shelf tools.

A font object by default is treated as a single piece of geometry, no matter no matter how many letters are in it. So breaking the text “Shattered” will more or less focus the breakage on a certain area of the entire text.
So one of the solutions would be to handle the letters separately, by breaking them into separate groups, each group with its own letter. In this file, I separated the letters before the extrusion so there are less polygon faces to sort out when separating them. Check out this SideFX video (the last part) for a step-by-step on separation by letters.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=766&Itemid=241 [sidefx.com]

After the separation, I used a for-each node, which processed (extruded then shattered) each letters one by one. Double-click the foreach node to see the looped process. The letters are evenly shattered because they were shattered individually.

After that, use the RBD Glue Object tool to make a glue object, which will break apart only upon impact, and put down a ground plane to bash the text against–gravity is already added for you by Houdini.

Then hit play. Tweak the Physical parameters or the Internal Glue Strength of the RBD Glue Object (your text object) in the AutoDopNetwork if you want different results.

I can't place my hip file right now. But, no, it's not regular font. Houdini only does ASCII characters by default. I typed the text in Illustrator and imported the .ai into Houdini as path curves.

Thanks for the detailed info. I import AI work paths from Photoshop into Cinema 4D all the time. Can you bring them into Houdini aswell? If so, Would that be a better way of smashing text?

take a look at this tool i made, it works for me:
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=7105 [forums.odforce.net]

Still needs improvement though. I wanted to use group sop instead of copy and paste but didn't know how. :roll: