Disintegration

Hey guys,

I’m working on a personal research project, I wonder what the possibilities are around disintigrating objects in Unreal 4.
The goal is to dynamicaly disintegrate an entire environment depending on the radius of the character.

I did some research already and I found that it might be a good way to just use a grey map adding values in the material to that map and using that as a sort of mask while spawning particles.
Like you can see here;

*Note this is not my own, this is an approche I found online.

Where i’m intrested in however is if you guys might know other ways to do it. The disintegration process can be in many different ways, for example disintegrating in water, dust, …
I’m going to look in to the possibilities of Houdini and if there is any way can link this to unreal, but to be frank I have never worked with the programe yet, but i’ll figure something out.

Help much appreciated!
Kind Regards,
Lokke!