Hello!
I’m a senior at Clarkson University working on my capstone project, and was wondering if I could get any feedback. It’s a shattering plugin for Maya that allows an artist to draw or take an image of how they want fractures to look and then applies them to a mesh.
I’ve got two image processing scripts which take a fracture map and remove much of the unnecessary pixels and leave only points that represent where a crack changes direction. From here I plan on constructing a mesh with these points and using that mesh to ‘slice’ through another mesh.
NVidia’s Apex Destruction has something similar to this, but I plan to take it a step further and use a gradient map to create an animation, instead of shattering the mesh all at once.
So far I have two image processing scripts which admittedly are not artist-firendly yet, so to run with your own image, you need to make sure it’s in greyscale mode and only contains black and white. Then name it ‘out.gif’.
Thinner.py should be run first and then run LineFitter.py, it will output a series of coordinates which can be made into a mesh. The scripts were coded up just to get something working by the end of the semester so no error checking/usability has been added in yet. If anyone cares to try them out and gets errors, please let me know so I can fix them/add support for how you are trying to use them.
Currently LineFitter only outputs a text file with the coordinates of the fracture, I’m trying to figure out what sort of file makes sense to output the information to.
I have a few more weeks to get my first iteration of the plugin done, so any thoughts/feedback would be appreciated. Thanks!