How much effort goes into an animation like this?
It's a mix of physics simulation and rigged props. The bits that go flying are physics, the bits that bend & twist are rigged. The rigged models process is basically position the bones, weightmap everything, start keyframing.
The physics props are easy to set up (I use a plugin called PullDownIt), but it requires several takes before you get a physics result that works well enough. And sometimes you get in this loop where you endlessly fiddle with the settings over and over to avoid jitter or bad collisions, etc, etc.
Grindstone says I've spent 18 hours so far on the cinematic, but most of that was spent trying to figure out how to do the main ramp. I ended up modeling the damage, rigging it, and animating it by hand because I couldn't simulate it with physics. Twisted metal is kinda tricky to simulate unless you have Houdini or some other high end plugin.
[edit] The small barrier in the middle hasn't been animated yet, btw -- it'll need to twist/bend as the crates clip past it.
Right now the different props are a little out of sync with one another, but that might not be noticeable in the final result. And if it is noticeable, it's relatively easy to fix by just shifting the keyframes a little. The gif is about 1/2 speed.
