Crash Into Me By Albert Borris

So You Want to Use Crash Into Me By Albert Borris

I've spent years dealing with asset rendering pipelines, and Crash Into Me By Albert Borris has come up more often than I care to admit in conversation threads. It's a Maya plugin designed to handle collision detection and procedural object interaction, particularly for dynamic simulations. The developer is Albert Borris, who's been maintaining it for a while on platforms like Creative Crash and Gumroad. If you're trying to figure out whether it's worth your time or money, here's how it actually works in practice and what you'll run into.

Getting Started With Crash Into Me By Albert Borris

The installation process is straightforward enough. Download the package, open Maya, and go to Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager. Click Browse and point it at the .mll file inside the plugin folder. Load it up and you should see the Crash Into Me panel appear in your interface. The core functionality revolves around picking objects and assigning collision parameters to them. You select your geometry, click a button, and the plugin generates the necessary collision layers and tag assignments automatically. For rigid body simulations, this used to take me fifteen minutes by hand. With the plugin running correctly, it takes about thirty seconds. Here's the part nobody really warns you about: the plugin relies heavily on Maya's built-in rigid body and nCloth systems working together. If your Maya version is newer than what the developer tested against, you might find that certain buttons do nothing or throw errors. I had this issue with Maya 2024 when the latest build of Crash Into Me By Albert Borris hadn't been updated yet. The workaround was to set your environment variable MAYA_DISABLE_CLE=1 before launching Maya, which forced the plugin to bypass a deprecated function call that was causing the crash on startup.

How It Actually Works Under the Hood

The plugin creates proxy collision geometry from your selected meshes rather than making the actual render geometry do the heavy lifting. This matters because it keeps your simulation faster. The proxy meshes are simpler and the solver doesn't choke on high-poly details. You can control the proxy density through a slider in the plugin panel. One thing beginners miss is that the automatic collision layer naming can get messy fast. If you're working on a scene with more than twenty animated objects, you'll end up with layers named things like CollisionGroup_0047_A and you won't remember what any of them correspond to. I started exporting the layer list to a text file after each major update to keep track. It's tedious but saves you from spending hours debugging why a character's cloth is clipping through geometry that should have been covered. The second counter-intuitive thing is that more proxy subdivisions doesn't always mean better results. There's a point of diminishing returns where adding more detail to the proxy mesh actually makes the simulation less stable because the solver has to calculate more collision pairs per frame. I found that keeping the proxy at a moderate subdivision level and using the collision margin slider instead gives you cleaner results without the instability.

Common Problems and Where It Falls Apart

Crash Into Me By Albert Borris isn't perfect. The biggest limitation is its handling of continuous collision detection. For slow-moving objects it works fine. For fast projectiles or rapidly spinning geometry, you'll get tunneling artifacts where the object passes through collision geometry between simulation frames. The developer has acknowledged this and recommended enabling sub-stepping in the solver settings, but that increases render time significantly. If you need CCD for your project, you might be better off using Bifrost for the simulation portion and only using Crash Into Me for the initial setup phase. Another issue is performance with very large scenes. I tried running it on a city block simulation with over three hundred static props and the plugin started throwing memory warnings during the proxy generation phase. Maya itself would still run but the proxy creation took upwards of ten minutes for a subset of objects that should have been instant. The fix was to break the scene into smaller chunks and process them separately rather than selecting everything at once. There's also the question of support. The plugin is sold directly through the developer's storefronts, which means you don't get the backing of a large company with a support team. If something breaks after a Maya update, you're largely depending on Albert's willingness to push a patch. The update cycle has been irregular, ranging from weeks to months depending on what changed.

Is It Worth It

If you're doing moderate complexity simulations where automated collision setup would normally eat up most of your day, Crash Into Me By Albert Borris pays for itself quickly. The time savings on scenes with dozens of interacting objects is real and measurable. For simple one-off projects, the learning curve and potential version compatibility headaches might not be worth the expense. I'd suggest downloading the trial version first if available and running it on your own pipeline setup before committing. Your scene complexity and Maya version will determine whether it actually helps or just adds another dependency to manage.