How to make text solid??

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Sound like you’re trying to use Clothilde (a cloth simuator) to do hard body dynamics, which doesn’t work so well. You can *sort* of do it if you turn the cloth stiffness way up, but it’s not going to give a great result.

Try using Dynamics module or the explosion fx deformer instead. Only the latter will give you fragmentation — otherwise you’ll have to break up the letters yourself.

[Duncan Ball]

Thanks for your help on this.

so if I want the text to be solid I need to make it a rigid body dynamic?

If so how do I make my colide object react with the text?

Also if I wanted to split my text manually can I do it like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oln5uNOu3U0 if so how?

Sorry for all the questions, its just I’m finding so many tutorials/forum threads all saying different things.

Many thanks

[Duncan Ball]

Hi there,

I just followed this tutorial using the dynamic tag you suggested, however if I were able to cut the text up to make solid shapes (rather than hollow ones) would I then make the parts I wanted to move have a mass and the ones I didnt 0? does that make sense? or would you go about doing this in a totally different way?

I’ve read about thinking particles but this scares me somewhat 🙂

Many thanks

[Duncan Ball]

helps if I put the link down: https://www.maxoncomputer.com/tutorial_detail.asp?tutorialID=205

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Unfortunately Cinema doesn’t have that neat utility that’s being demonstrated in the video, so it would take some work to split up the text. One way to do it would be to use the explosion deformer. I would center it on the letter(s) you want to break up, set the explosion force to a very low number (like .1 or less) and then make the letter editable. So it would go something like this:

*Extrude text (use triangles/regular grid on caps);
*Make text editable;
*Run opitimize to weld caps;
*Run “explode segments” to break it up into individual letters;

To fracture a letter:
*drag explosion deformer under letter;
*set strength to low number (like 100 or so);
*play with cluster settings to get appropriate fracturing;
*set strength very low (like .1 or less);
*make letter editable (current state to object);
*run explode segments on editable letter — that will break it up into fragments;
*apply dynamics to result.

Personally I don’t use the dynamics module (!) so I can’t help you from there. I use a dynamics plugin instead (Silver Bullet/PhyRis).

[Duncan Ball]

Hi there,

Thanks for all your help I think I’m nearly there:

How do I get it to look like the original T before I edited it, so that I can animate impact?

Thanks again for all your help!

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Mmmm, you can’t! The idea is to assign a very tiny amount of strength to the explosion deformer before you do the current state to object, so it’s just enough to create the clusters but not enough to change the appearance of the text very much.

You won’t be able to avoid very slight changes, so what I would do is keep a copy of the real text and then animate/switch visibility just as the collider makes impact.