Deborah R. Fowler
Rubik's Cube Disintegration
Posted Jan 25 2021Updated Jan 31 2021
Created using particles systems, pop vop, pop wrangle, pop spin, pop interact. This follows the same method of disintegration described on my website here.
Also on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz4krUw7sfA
This is an excellent example of using pop vop to create a curve pop follow to use the tangentu value from a polyframe node. A pop spin was then added with a vexpression to make the spin axis and speed dependent per particle, a pop wrangle to increase velocity, and a pop interact to push the cubes away from each other to avoid obvious intersections.
Although there is a curve follow tool in Houdini I wanted to control this with a vopsop or vex using a point cloud search. First the curve is prepared and a tangentu attribute is created by using the polyframe node:
Once this is set, the tangent information will be used for the velocity of the particle based on proximity. A vopsop version is shown below:
I also created a vex version which is functionally equivalent.
In addition a pop spin node was used to allow random spinning. This was achieved with a VEXpression. When these are on the node note that spinspeed and axis are already existing variables.
Tip: If a boolean fails on a frame you can usually select options to work on the problematic frame using selection of intersect or custom rather than subtract. This happened during this animation, frame 159, and was quickly resolved with this method. In addition, the color selection for the inside of the cube was also assigned using the boolean groups to grab just the inside.