Hole in ground shot breakdown

First Crack shot

My intention of the next series of shots was to show the audience the devastation the Lambton worm was creating with-in Darlington town centre. When I first designed this project I was going to create a series of shots that showed the ground cracking. I created some early test shots. However I found that the animation did not look right.

I then tried to create a simulation using a 3^rd party plug-in for Maya called blast-code. Basically with this program you create the surface (nurbs suface) , you then create a bomb and play with the settings so that the ground cracks. What I found is that the ground cracks pretty well. However the only problem I found is that the geometry seems to collide with its self. This moves me on to the next problem I came across. I wanted to create a camera projection of the road which was pretty easy. However I also wanted to create a texture for the inside of the road. The problem with this is that Blast-code could not handle sub-surface texturing.

Knowing that Blast-code wasn’t producing what I wanted I decided to take a different approach. I decided to show the devastation the worm had all ready created. This meant that all I had to do was create a hole in the ground.

I decided to use 3D studio max for this problem. The reason I decided to use this piece of software because I found I can produce photorealistic renders with less effort then say XSI.

The first thing I did was that I imported the picture of the shot that I was going to create. I then lined the grid up with the picture so that it matched the ground and the perspective. I then created a ground plane and applied a shadow matte shader to it. This is a special texture that makes the plane transparent; however it also has the ability to receive casted shadows.

I then created another plane for the hole. I simply created a displacement map so that it appeared that the hole had depth and detail.

After looking through my research I found it necessary to create some debris. To create every piece by hand would have taken hours. So I devised a plan and created the digital debris in particle flow which comes with 3D studio max. With particle flow you create a small groups of objects (in my case rocks). You then create a plane to tell the debris where it should be placed. After setting the amount and the randomness you get a field of rocks all shapes and sizes.