Tank VS Plants Dynamics FX Test

About a month a go RealtimeUK and Barefoot VFX did a amazing Trailer for the onlien game, World Of Tanks. In the trailer we see some of the tanks go smashing through trees and hedges as they are on there way to battle. It looks so amazing you can see the ripping branches, a lot of leaves been shredded from the bushes is totally amazing!

So I had a go at it, I actually put the final result on Vimeo but was not happy with it so have took it down to re do it.

Here is a screenshot of the first test though!

My Method Was:

Firstly I created an animation of a tank rolling up a hill in 3DS Max, the tank is not rigged so i was just rotating it and positioning it on the angle of the hill and then key-framing that, so it looks like its moving across the terrain.

I then exported my scene to Maya where I created some paint effects Bushes. I then converted them to Polygons and used nCloth to simulate the collision between the tank and the leaves. It worked out well because the leaves and branches were seprate objects then combined into one so when they were simulated the leaves split apart from one another and it looked awesome with all the leaves flying around. I also key framed my gravity to start only when my tank hits the hedge therefore my hedge is still until the tank collides.

For an experiment I also used PullDownIt for Maya to create a fence that the tank was to smash through however this did not work out due to there was no way for it to interact with the nCloth simulation so it looked very fake!

One main problem I found with nCloth was that when I wanted to use say to bushes getting hit by the tank then for one I would have to create two different Nucleus Solvers as if they were under the same solver the gravity would not work. So I created two different Nucleus's each had key-framed gravity so when the tank impact the hedge the gravity is activated. However the nCloth Collison mesh only works with one Nucleus?? So I don't understand how you can create multiple solvers but then the collision will only work with one?? Anyway so I had a brainwave,what I did was create a brand new solver with NO gravity enabled and then over each hedge I put a gravity field which was bounded and positioned over the hedge. Then I key-framed each one of there gravity strengths to start when the tank hits. That worked out great.  Here is a Screenshot of that:

I would then export all of this Back to 3DS Max for the render. Screenshot Below.

The Final Shot:

Thanks for looking at my blog!