I’m about to buy a copy of Volume Breaker from Cebas, but the more I research into it, I wonder whether it’s the right plugin. I want to beable to simulate buildings crumbling and falling down, as well as other distruction of random objects such as lamp posts or benches. But I dont know if Phoenix can do this. I know if can do smoke and water etc and if it can do more solid object effects then its a bonus.
I’ve seen Rayfire and that does look good too, but never had the chance to use it.
The main reason I ended up at Volume Breaker first is that it comes with a copy of ScalpelMAX which I was about to buy anyway.
Does anyone have any strong views on which would be the better buy, and the advantages of one over the other?
VolumeBreaker will not simulate your buildings or objects crumpling down at all. It will fracture your objects into volumetric pieces, that’s it. If you make them fall down using Thinking Particles or reactor or physx does not matter, but Volume Breaker will not do that for you.
Phoenix can not do rigid body dynamics nor fracturing (and i doubt that it will, because it is beyond the scope of a fluid simulation plugin (smoke and explosions are also fluid simulations in that regard)
Long story short i would suggest going for Rayfire:
It is a strong rigid body simulation tool (it does not use its own solver, but reactor or physx)
It comes with strong a nicely artist directable fracturing tools
Does automatic impact based subfracturing (piece of concrete hitting the floor beeing shattered again)
I will take a look in to Thinking Particles, as hasn’t Reactor been removed in 2012? I guess Physx is as good though.
I will have to see if I can get demos of Rayfire and Thinking Particles and see which works the best for us. I guess you still need VolumeBreaker to do the fracturing before Thinking Particles?
Rayfire does seem to be a good all in one rigid body simulation tool from youtube videos. I like the impact based subfracturing. Can see a need for that in a couple of projects!
Thinking Particles is a very powerful system. It has a pretty steep learning curve tho. And yes with TP you would need VolumeBreaker to fracture your objects unless you are happy with the free tools out there (see scriptspot).
I am not sure if the current versions of RayFire still support reactor at all. Physx is definitely the better choice there i guess.
Thinkin Particles can do a lot more beyond destructional effects, but in turn the price point is a bit daunting compared to rayfire. You can get a rayfire license for 325$ while you need to shove out nearly 2500$ for Thinking Particles + Volume Breaker. If you really only need destruction then setup and usage will also be a lot more straight forward.
A second vote for rayfire. You get volume breaker included inside of thinking particles 4 but it’s not really accessible from outside of tp as a general purpose fragmenter. Also volume breaker has a fraction of the methods of breaking than rayfire has as Thorsten has mentioned, so a lot of artists will pre break with rayfire and feed that into thinking particles for the setup and sims.
I don’t own RayFire but I have Orbaz’s PFlow Toolbox 2 and I would be a little wary of any plug that relies heavily or solely on PhysX. Nvidia’s developments of the PhysX tools for Max has been incredibly erratic. Every new version for quite a while now has had fewer features than the previous one and the latest version was apparently plain broken (RayFire even warns against using it on its website). This is a particularly big deal if you use Max 2012 because MassFX considerably limits what RayFire can do (no interactive demolition, which kind of defeats that whole purpose) and it will not allow you to use Reaktor as a fallback. A fix has been promised by Nvidia as imminent since early May.
Yep, I have to confirm what BB3 is saying. I bought rayfire and it works fine with max 2011.. physx plugin installed etc, but with max 2012 there is no full support by physx for all the features in rayfire. A lot of people are waiting for an update…
there is a problem i have found though. in one of their tutorial files it takes a falling cube. when it hits the ground it starts the fracturing process gradually then at the end all pieces are new objects run by tp. the problem comes that vray will motion blur the first object falling. then motion blur the end when its all into seperate pieces but not the inbetween. i brought this up in the vray problems section and no one commented on it.
Having spoken to Mr Rayfire I have bought one copy, and am looking forward to the PhysX update next week. 2012 without interactive distruction is a bit shit!