The popular gaming physics engine “Bullet” (a competitor to Havok & PhysX) was instrumental in some of the effects shots created by Digital Domain for the destruction of Los Angeles in 2012. In an article on Millimeter they discuss how they first had to create the tool, before they could create the scene.
“It was obvious that off-the-shelf rigid body solvers wouldn’t work for this,” Leo says. “Hundreds of objects needed to tumble and shatter and break. To make the scale of that destruction believable we’d have to put in so much detail.”
This challenge led DD to develop a new simulation system called Drop. “Our software team built it around a fast, open-source engine called Bullet,” Leo says. “Bullet was the core solver, but we established a system for generating and breaking constraints and for assigning material properties to objects. That allowed us to do things that are very difficult for rigid body solvers, such as concave objects and organic shapes where collisions become very complicated. Drop is tremendously fast, and it allowed artists to iterate on a fairly long simulation in an hour or two. We were able to simulate tens of thousands of colliding objects.”
via 2012 Step by Step.
