Quietus: Maya Cracks Tests

For one of the scenes in Quietus there will be CGI cracks projected onto a real floor, to create these cracks I did a bit of research into using nCloths in Maya in this way. I got a fairly decent result eventually, however the floor bends slightly and looks too flimsy. I am going to try out different approaches in Maya until I can achieve a more solid result.

In this second test I used a plugin called PDI, or "Pull Down It". It creates the fractured segments automatically, however I am still working out how to stop them jiggling so much. I may use PDI to create the segment shapes, then apply the nCloth method as it seems to have more control over the physics. 
In this test, I used the segments created with the PDI plugin, and used the nCloth dynamics to control their physics. The result it a lot smoother, however I needed to constrain more than just the outer most vertices, as the majority of the platform is falling away, and the outer segments just swing on their constraints. This took a very very long time to render, just because I had about 500 rigid bodies and I didn't bake their animation either. The next test will have less segments and be much more controlled. (hopefully). 

In this version I reduced the number of segments so it rendered a lot quicker, added a black lambert shader to the outer faces and white to the inner faces, and lastly added the light shining effect in after effects. I inverted the colour just to see how it would look when we do some test projections.