Smash a Brick Wall With Houdini Shelf Tools

Mark Spevick Shows How to Smash a Brick Wall Using Only Houdini Shelf Tools.

A new 3-part series by Mark Spevick teaches how powerful Houdini Shelf tools are. Spevick shows how to create a destruction simulation where a car bursts through a brick wall. It’s a great beginners series for fledgling Houdini Artists. The first part of the tutorial walks through setting up a bullet rigid body dynamics simulation using shelf tools. Spevick walks through caching the sim and animation and how to see the results in a flipbook.

Part 2 dives a bit deeper showing off the contributing nodes and how they work together to create the exploding brick wall. Also covers is how to create custom attributes to define some bricks as active and some as passive and use this to control how your final sim looks. The last video in the series looks into constraints, how to use impact data to control the actual breaking of the wall. Destruction is always a fun thing to create and having a car smash a brick wall is a great project to learn.

To follow along, you can download the project files which include the brick wall and moving car.