Prop Destruction Workflow
The Goal: cartoonish fractured chunks that maintain the UVs and material assignments of the input mesh. Must also be low poly.
The Problem: non-fracture-friendly geo and lots of small parts. "messy" geo. Different artists modelling things differently. EG: hollow vs solid.
The Solution: Houdini workflow that fractures the input mesh based off cutter-chunks, such that the chunkID is used to group and combine all input mesh parts with their respective chunk-buddies.
This video shows how the workflow went.( Please excuse the lack of voice over. I'm working on recording a new one)
The result in engine.
Prop Destruction Workflow
Stoic's VFX team wanted fractured versions of props for destruction effects.
In Houdini, I was able to set up a system that extracted the mesh name from an imported fbx, clean and poly reduce the input mesh, then with parametrized cutter-chunks, cut the input mesh. Then export each chunk, named properly into an output directory. Ready for import into the engine. The system maintains the original UVs and material assignments. On the UE5 Niagara side, I set up a quick example using Mesh Flipbooks to burst spawn all the mesh chunks for a given asset.
This was a workflow I set up in production, so I did not attempt to make it a singular, self contained OTL, but rather a flexible mix of custom nodes which I would duplicate for each asset that needed to be processed.