HOW can i create a Disintegration effect?
Nick Luckson, UK
There are two methods to make a disintegration effect. You can use an ncloth simulation – which, as you might imagine, is resource-heavy – or you can use particles and opacity maps. The second method is very easy to simulate and doesn’t require too many resources from your machine. Although the particles generated do require some resources, it’s nothing compared to the ncloth simulation’s required power.
For the second method, in short, you need to prepare a monochrome map of how you want your mesh to disappear. Before you do that, however, you might need to redo the UV mapping – I find that camera projection works best to do so but that’s not always an option, especially on a complex mesh. A better solution to this problem is to take your mesh into a texture painting tool such as Substance Painter and outline the parts of your mesh that you want to disintegrate first. This helps you understand how the map will react to your mesh and then you can take it into After Effects or similar and animate the map. You have to take it from all black to all white or the other way around – it doesn’t matter which way you do it, since you can always invert the settings from inside the 3D application you’re using (I’m using Maya).
Once you have the map of how the mesh will disappear, you also need a map to generate particles. In Maya, you can use a monochrome map to generate particles: white for where the highest number of particles will be generated and black for where no particles will be generated. As your mesh is disintegrating, you need to make sure that some particles are generating at the points that are disintegrating. You can use the map that
you already have and simply apply a plugin such as Find Edges in After Effects, or you can generate a map yourself, it’s not that difficult. You just have to whiten the parts that are being disintegrated and blacken the rest. Make sure that once you’ve disintegrated a part, you make it black again. Usually, a line going through the mesh works well.
Once you have both animating maps, export them in a preferable image sequence. Now they’re ready to be used in Maya and to apply to the mesh. We’ll talk more about this in the following steps.