Blender Destruction Tutorial: 9 Ways to Destroy Things

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Here we have Blender Destruction Tutorial and 9 crazy examples of total destruction: rigid body fracture, molecular and even cloth destruction! Don’t try this at home, some of the techniques are really unstable.

Rock ‘n’ roll.

Blender Destruction

Irony of such simulations is that we create something just to destroy it. In a sense, we creating destruction.

Hopefully, we have plenty of tools at our disposal to obliterate, demolish and explode. Some of them – like rigidbody fracture by physics – are obviously linked to destruction. But if we think outside the box,  some other tools – like cloth simulation – can create an interesting destruction possibilities too!

1.  Soft body demolition (requires special branch from Graphicall.org)

A few words on this technique. It’s not included in Blender by default and I don’t know exactly whether this branch is being supported or not. But anyway, softbody with polygon breaking threshold is an interesting way to destroy.

soft body demolition blender

2. Rigid body (unconstrained) + fracture

Rigid body plus fracture – what can I say? Perhaps, it’s the most popular combo used to simulate destruction.

rigidbody fracture blender

3. Rigid body (constrained) + fracture

We can alter destruction behavior using constraints to keep objects together under certain threshold.

destruction tutorial blender

4. Build modifier

Build modifier hides (random) polygons over time.

build modifier blender destruction

5. UFO anti gravitational beam

Explode modifier and some particles – ‘fake’ way of doing destruction, but in some cases it provides interesting results. For example, pieces of paper flying in the air.

blender explode modifier

6. Cloth simulation + 0 stiffness 

Yep, cloth can be used to simulate a crumpling and deformation of the surface.

destruction tutorial blender cloth

7. Boolean modifier

Using Boolean modifier in Blender, we can slice the geometry.

boolean modifier blender

8. Molecular add-on

Molecular add-on (another very promising, but somewhat unstable tool) can be used to simulate such substances as sand, mud, jelly and many other particle-based effects.

molecular addon blender

9. Molecular one more time (for the wind effect)

molecular addon destruction blender tutorial

Something else?

Know other ways of destruction? Go ahead and share it!

    Gleb Alexandrov

    28 comments

    1. Pingback: 9 Ways to Destroy Things | BlenderNation

    3. mdriftmeyer

      When will you begin taking into account the material lattice properties of structures? In Finite Element Analysis doing an impact deformation/fracture simulation you have to include these properties to more accurately produce a simulated real-world result.

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    5. Eka Kurniawan

      *physics*

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    6. Gordon

      I tried the cloth simulation. But somehow parts of the cloth always keep sticking on the deforming object. Are there any special collision settings you don’t mention in the video?

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      • Gleb Alexandrov

        Gordon, I’ve encountered this bug too. What helped is I subdivided the deforming object (selected all vertices and then W+S a few times). Maybe this bug happens when the deforming object is ‘lower resolution’ than the cloth. Please try and tell if it helps 🙂

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        • Gordon

          I’ve already thought of increasing the resolution of the deforming object, and that really helps. But with a little more experiments I found out, if even a very high resolution doesn’t fix the bug (or you don’t want to have a much too high polycount in your deformer), than you can change the default collision settings of the deformer as well. Under Collision > “Soft Body and Cloth” you’ll find the “Outer” and “Inner” values. If I set the default outer value of 0.02 to something like 0.05 I get rid of the bug. Of course this changes the way the deformation looks like as well, because now the distance between the deformer and the cloth is bigger. But in most cases that doesn’t matter too much.

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          • Gleb Alexandrov

            Indeed, it helps to fix it collision, and no one will perceive the fake. Anyway, when one object is going to crash into another, we anticipate the deformation before it actually happens. Nice!

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            • Gordon

              Yes, but it’s not only anticipation. If you set the value much higher your deformer makes a dent a lot bigger than itself 🙂

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    7. Josh

      Your scenes setup look amazing. Do you have any links to download some of these scenes? I am wanting to experiment with the molecular wind one you have posted up there.

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      • Gleb Alexandrov

        Josh, I think it’s actually a good idea to post some of the scenes. A bit later on, though. Hoping to do it in the next few weeks.

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    8. Bill Morris

      Gleb. I am having a hard time getting the molecular without wind to work. My particles just bounce up and down in the cube. How is the floor setup? Do you create an object cube to use as the particles. I am using 2.71?

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    9. Bill Morris

      Thanks Gleb. Really appreciate that.

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      • Gleb Alexandrov

        Molecular is pretty unpredictable, so if you get some cool result, send me the link :))

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    10. Bill Morris

      Gleb, one issue I am having, everything shows up on render but the cube. I know you have the emitter box unchecked. I ran the blend file straight from the down load. Baked then ran it. In the animation the cube doesn’t show up. neither do the particles

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      • Gleb Alexandrov

        My fault. In the ‘Render’ rollout of the particle system you should set it to ‘Object’ type, then pick the cube as a dupliobject (and play with the size).

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    11. Lucas J

      I cannot install the Destroy Modifier from Graphicall.org. When I unzip the file all it is are the same files it has under Program Files>Blender Foundation>Blender but it is an older update. Im just confused on how to install this addon could you lead me in the right direction. Thanks.

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    12. Yokelabductee

      is there any tutorials out there specifically for the two molecular examples?

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    13. Rare Guy

      Hey Gleb!
      After fracturing my model and hitting the play button
      my model explodes, don’t know why.
      I set the shape of the shards to Convex Hull, didn’t make the original model a rigidbody and even increased the steps to about 240/sec.

      Help!

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    14. Lörd

      We need the .blend file.

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