Old/Broken wall

[Aaron]

Hello!

Is it possible to create old/broken walls with Railclone(Pro)?
We've studied several topics about walls and bricks and while some were very useful, we can't quite connect all dots (just) yet
to make something like the attachment below.
Any help and guidance would be hugely appreciated!

[Aaron]

It would already be of tremendous help if someone could tell how to setup an array of bricks that has irregular end points and tapers/slopes the higher it gets.
The brickwall script can slope but on the wrong axis and we're also pretty clueless on how to get the end bricks to stick out at irregular intervals.
I hope this isn't too complicated.

[Aaron]

Nobody at all? 

[iToo]

Hi, sorry for the delay. This case is complex and our team is trying several solutions.
They will post here soon.

[Paul Roberts]

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for the question. You can achieve a similar effect to this by stopping the array for each row before it gets to the end of the spline using a Conditional operator. The conditional operator can choose segments based on their position along the spline. By incrementally decreasing the position threshold you can get a tapered effect. To do this you create a Conditional operator and Export the Spline Position parameter. Wire this to a Arithmetic operator and add an equation that uses the Y Segment Count as a multiplier. I used this equation:

100-((SegmentYCounter+Input2)*(Input1/XSplineLength))

Where Input1 and Input2 are Random number nodes, used to add some variation.

If you want to add an eroded start then this is more work. You can't simply remove the bricks because they determine the position of others further along the spline. Instead we must use a similar approach to swap bricks for null segments - spaces - that have exactly the same size as the brick geometry.

The style gets a little complex, but based on this question we will refine this and include it as a Macro in RailClone 3. In the meantime, please find attached a sample scene.
 



I hope that helps, please let me know if you have any further questions.

Many Thanks,

Paul

[Aaron]

Dear Paul,

What a stunning piece of work! This is exactly what we were trying to achieve ourselves so thanks a zillion kittens and puppies for the awesome example.
Yeah, we already figured having eroded starts/ends would either be icing on the cake or best left for fracturing with a script. We're still unsure on where to go with that one.
If we take this output into ZBrush we can sculpt things relatively easy but many times we need things to stay purely inside Max. for rapid visualizations.
Obviously having things fully parametric would be the quickest route for quick iterations/refinements so we're looking very much forward to that refined RC3 macro :-)
Thanks again, you've been a huge help!

-Aaron