Destructing Elements in Maya With PullDownIt: Part 6 | How To
1. Creating Jagged Shatter
Step 1
Open Maya.

Step 2
Create a polygon sphere
mesh in the perspective view port.
Step 3
With the sphere selected, click on the ShatterIt feature
icon.
Step 4
In the ShatterIt
feature window, set the values of Num Shards to 64 and click
on Shatter It! button.
Step 5
Pick a broken chunk and move it out a bit. While inspecting,
you will see that the edges are quite flat. There are no jagged edges there.
Step 6
Undo the move. Click on Add
jaggedness to fragments icon.
Step 7
It opens the Add jaggedness Deformer window.
With all chunks selected, click on Select PDI Fragment. Increase the
value of Strength to 2 and then click on Add Jaggedness
button.
Step 8
You can see that the
chunks have jagged edges.
2. Creating Jagged Shatter Simulation
Step 1
Create a cube polygon mesh in the perspective view port.
Step 2
Lift the cube up a bit
from the ground as shown in the following image.
Step 3
With the cube selected,
click on the ShatterIt feature icon.
Step 4
In the ShatterIt
feature window, set the values of Num Shards to 200,
Shatter Style to Uniform and click on Shatter It! button.
Step 5
With all chunks
selected, click on Add jaggedness to fragments icon.
Step 6
In the Add jaggedness
Deformer window, click on Select PDI Fragment. Increase the value
of Strength to 2 and then click on Add Jaggedness button.
Step 7
You can see that the chunks have jagged edges.
Step 8
Create a plane on the
perspective grid. With the plane selected, click on Create Pdi Body icon.
In the Create Rigid Body window, set Type as Static and
turn on Mesh option. Close the window.
Step 9
Jump in the Dynamics mode. Go to Fields >
Gravity.
Step 10
Go to gravity field’s
attribute editor and set the value of Volume Shape to Cube.
Step 11
Scale up the size of
gravity field’s gizmo and put it beneath the cube chunks as shown in the
following image.
Step 11
Create another gravity field. Set the value of Volume
Shape to Cube.
Step 12
Animate the Scale value of the gravity field as shown
in the following image.
Step 13
With all chunks
selected, click on Create Pdi Body icon. In the Create Rigid Body
window, set Type as Dynamic and turn on Mesh option. Close
the window.
Step 14
With the chunks
selected, click on Set Pdi Dynamics Properties icon.
Step 15
In the Pdi Dynamics
properties window, turn on affected by Force Fields option
and then click on Include/ Exclude button. It further opens a
sub-window.
Select both gravityField1 and gravityField2 and click
on Accept.
Step 16
Click on Pdi Solver
Options icon. In the Pdi Solver Options window, disable the Gravity
option.
Step 17
Press the Play button to
see the simulation as shown in the following image.
Conclusion
In the next part of the tutorial, I’ll show you some more fields based shatter simulation.