Disintegration Project (Fullsail)

For this project, I needed to do something that I have not done in previous classes. After a lot of thinking I decided on doing a disintegration effect. When looking for reference I found out that there were many different types disintegration. The way I was going to pull off this effect was to use ncloth in Maya. I figured that it was the best was to create the effect with little knowledge for using this effect. I also found out other reasons to use this effect. One of these reasons being, the ability to get a car to change paint colors by tearing off the old paint. For this project I needed a high res piece of geometry in order to get the best effect. SO what I did was look back at my old modeling projects and found a low res project that I enjoyed making. I then took that geometry, and made sure everything was one piece.  I then needed more faces in order to get a better effect. So I subdivided the geometry and went from about 200faces to about 200,000faces. Now that I have a lot of faces, I selected all of the edges on the object and detached them from each other. Now all the faces should be separated from each other. Then select the entire mesh and make it all ncloth. Next your going to want to turn off the gravity for ncloth, so it doesn’t move until it reacts with something. NOW THIS IS A MAJOR STEP, make sure you go to you nucleus and turn off both collision and self-collisions. If you don’t do this, your simulation will take an eternity to sim or worse crash Maya. Now we have to make something for the ncloth to react with. I created a volume axis field for mine and enlarged it in order to cover my entire mesh. But you could use just about any field. You then animate the field to move through your mesh. You will need to adjust a few settings in field in order to get it to work properly. The settings I changed were: Along Axis, Turbulence, Turbulence speed, turbulence frequency, and turbulence offset. Once you are done tweaking the settings you should be done. Once you get the motion the way you want it, cache it out, and then render. I think my project turned out really well. The only thing I wish had gotten it to do is getting the faces to fade away as the got so far away from the object.