Parachute test:

For the end of the demo we talked about having a cut scene where our character jumps off a cliff and releases a parachute. After we talked about this I started to look at parachutes in games and tried to find some rigs on the Internet. To my amazement I had problems finding any parachute rigs, and I didn't find any game rigs. I ended up focusing on the parachute in Just Cause 2 since it plays a big part of the game and you can use it whenever you want.
Looking at this I was thinking about using the method I used on my auto swim rig for the swimming motion. It's basically a sin wave. So my plan was to use this to add random noise to the different parts of the parachute. When I actually started trying to make the rig I had gotten another idea. To use nCloth in Maya and bake the simulation to joints. This worked surprisingly well and only took me a couple of minutes to set up and have it working perfectly. After baking the simulation to the joints I also animated them to make it look like it's opening up. Here is a quick demo of the test and how it is rigged in Maya. I've done another test where I put more turbulence into the nCloth and again this worked perfect.

Destruction test:

For another cut scene we planned to have a cave in if the player doesn't respond to the warnings he's given and get out. So I started looking into doing destruction in game. At first I played with the idea of real time physics, but quickly realised that it was unnecessary and would require more work to look good. Since it's a cut scene we have full control over the sequence and we want to have control over the falling pieces as well. Because of this we're going to do simulation and then baking out the simulation to the objects. If this is going to the objects themselves or skin the objects to joints that have the simulation I'm not sure. I will have to do more test on this and see what the difference in speed and efficiency is. When I've looked at presentations of how other big game companies have done destruction they have simulated and used joints, so there must be a reason for this. Here is the test I did. The workflow so far is this: Use a plug-in called SOuP to shatter the objects -> Use the Bullet plug-in to simulate the rigid body -> Bake the simulation to the translate and rotate of the objects -> Export to Unity. I recently discovered that the GDC Vault has a lot of free presentations where I've found a lot of great techniques that I am eager to try out. I've mostly looked at FX in games and this is something I really want to focus on in the future, in addition to rigging. These are some of the most interesting and useful slides I've found so far (And yes, I do love Naughty Dog):

• Creating Flood Effects in Uncharted 3
  • http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015453/Creating-the-Flood-Effects-in
• Pushing for Large Scale Destruction FX
  • http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015886/Tackling-Large-Scale-Destruction-FX
• The Tricks Up Our Sleeves
  • http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015898/The-Tricks-Up-Our-Sleeves