Posted on August 5th, 2010
4740 views Overview So i wanted to start learning Rayfire after seeing a demo of it online. What a fantastic plugin it is. But when i searched the net i found little information on how to use the Plugin itself. I did how ever come across some Video tutorials which weren't very good quality (Might have been my Codecs) Getting frustrated i opened up Rayfire and started playing around and its actually fairly easy to learn. So here Im going to outline a VERY basic Animation just to get people used to what is what. So first off start By creating a basic Scene, Anything you like. Mine is Below
Part 2 Ok so here is the fun bit... the box across the other 2 boxes is going to be glass or any other fragile object, its entirely up to you. And the other 2 boxes and the plane are going to be inactive objects that dont move at all, if we didnt set them as inactive the whole scene would just drop. So first things first, open up your Rayfire plugin and make sure that the physX engine is selected under the Physics Tab like below
Right now select your Glass Box and click the Simulation Tab. When its open click the add button under the impact objects menu and your Glass box will appear in the selection area like below.
Now we need to break the glass before we animate it. So click the RayXplosion Tab and Select IRREGULAR for the Fragmentation type. The reason were doing this is because glass never brakes in the same way so when you select irregular it will cut all of the pieces out for you. Once you have done that click the fragment impact objects button and wait whilst Rayfire works its Magic.
Part 3 So after your Fragmentation is done you should have something like below (press F4 to see edge faces)
Now we need to set the scene around it to be static pieces so they don't move or fall. So select the Plane at the bottom and the 2 boxes and in the physics Tab scroll down to Unyielding objects and click the add button and like before all 3 items will be added to the Unyielding objects menu and thus not move when we start the animation. Select all of your Glass Pieces and go back to the Physics Tab in Rayfire and scroll down to Inactive objects and add all of the glass pieces to it. This makes the pieces of glass stay together until something hits it (or should do at least) you should have something like below. And remember to set the material to something you want like Glass, Rock ETC
We are nearly coming to a close now so just a few more things need doing like making the Geosphere move. First though drag it down so it’s fairly close to our “glass” and then whilst the Geosphere is still selected click on the Simulation Tab and under the “impact objects” menu select Add, and that should make it so the Geosphere will fall. Here’s what mine looks like. Now if you go back to the Physics Tab and under “Physical Options” set your Gravity to 1.3 and then click the play button with the record symbol with it. This makes it so you can rewind it and re‐edit if you need to. Go back to frame one and you can add materials and lighting to make the scene prettier and your done, render the animation like you would any other. I hope you found this tutorial helpful and i hope my next makes things clearer. Hopefully the next tutorial will be on Bullet simulation. Regards, Mike / Skino
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