I'm working on a new version of my Jeopardy! game, and I'm trying to improve the intro animation. Currently, the globe just fades out, which looks okay, but isn't even close to how it actually showed up on the original TV show. Here's a clip of what I want it to look like: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axQU2BpvbfU[/youtube] In my game, the globe is generated using gluSphere(). What would I need to do in order to get a shatter effect similar to the one seen in the above video? (I'm thinking a vertex shader, but I don't know where to start.)
This one would be hard to do with a shader, especially since different polygons are being transformed separately with a different value. It'd require writing noise, parsing and setting uniform values, generating matrices in the vertex and possibly the geometry shader. However, an easier and fast enough approach would be when generating the sphere to split it into several(dozen?) meshes/vertex arrays/VBOs, and then for each mesh to calculate ahead of time a random Vector3/float3 velocity and rotation, and then generate rotMatrix*posMatrix based on those values at a given frame for each mesh. That way you don't even need to have shaders. As for the model itself, you can make it easily in 3ds max, drop a texture on it, and then detach each group of polygons. As long as you can read any of the exportable formats, or even export the meshes yourself with maxscript. Of course other 3d modelling softwares can work as well.
