LightWave - Smoothing over surface breaks

[loud]

Got a question. I have a model that has a break in the surface, but I want it to look smooth when the surface is still intact. That is, it looks intact, but then breaks open, like an egg. I'm not sure how to go about getting Lightwave to smooth these breaks. Anyone have any thoughts?

[Bells of Freedom]

What is the object you want to do this on? Could you post a screenshot? That might help to be able to determine the best option.

[loud]

Well this is like a test thing right now to see if I can do the effect in Lightwave, but I'll do my best to describe it. What I have right now is a simple sphere, but it tears open similar to the facehugger eggs from the Alien movies. It starts out as a perfect sphere and then bursts open, or at least cracks open. So it's not like a chicken egg, where the shell breaks away as a solid piece, I'm using bones to have it peel open. Let me know if you want to see a screenshot and I'll grab one later, but I have to run.

[Tony Gardner]

Easiest way is to have two objects, one cut and one uncut.

Start the scene with the uncut one visible and the cut one 100% dissolved, then on the frame where the object bursts open hide the first object and unhide the second.

William Vaughan did a vid tute on the Newtek site of a breaking window using this technique.

ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/hardfx.mov

[PetGerbil]

Have two objects. One broken, one un-broken. Make the broken one 100% transparent until the frame you want to start cracking,then over the space of one frame bring it to 0%
transparent. Do the opposite with the unbroken one.

It's mentioned on one of Proton's video's.(unfortunately I can't remember which one.)

[PetGerbil]

curses! what he said /|\......They say great minds think alike....

[JackN]

or...

Create the object, save it, modify it to have the broken version, save that as a differfent name.

Use morphing bewteen the two versions. Keep in mind both objects must have the same point and poly count, and roughly the same structure even though the second is altered, or the morphing could possibly get twisted and wierd.

Probably better to dissolve between the two...

[loud]

Thanks for the help. The only problem with this technique, which I thought of first, is the "tearing" or "peeling" effect I'm going for. The breaks don't necessarily open up all at once, so changing from one object to the next in one frame will reveal the breaks before they're actually "broken". Any other ideas?

Again, thanks for the help so far!

[Bells of Freedom]

What about William Vaughan's rip.mov tutorial? Maybe you could incorporate some of his techniques. It uses ClothFX.

Go here: ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/
Look for rip.mov

[loud]

Thanks for the ideas. The effect that will actually be needed now has changed, so the "unbroken" object technique should work the way we're going to do it now.

(However, the clothFX tutorial has inspired me to go back to an old effect I tried to create with clothFX and see if I could pull it off now. Another experiment, but I didn't get around to getting into the nuts and bolts of clothFX at the time, so thanks for that too)