I have a question about the chaos fracturing patterns. I have been trying to get a wood splinter type look out of the voronoi fractures. Normally in a dcc app you could take say a plank of wood and scale it down on one axis prior to fracture, fracture it and then scale it back up post fracture and you have some nice cheap wood splinters. It seems regardless of how something is scaled the chaos fracture stays absolute regardless, the fracture points just scale up and down with the object. Is there a way to separate that out?
Wood splinters along its veins, which are often in a 3d shape rather than a flat 2d look.
So, if you are going for a realistic break, you’d have to create models outside the engine to group into a geometry collection.
If you don’t care, then several breaks with the tool should do the trick allright.
BLENDER does have some interesting addons that genereate hyper realistic wood breaks which could be levaraged in this case.
Creating the custom geometry collection needs some engine hacking (in 4.27), or even better, your own collection swap system. It’s definitely more work, so it depends on what result you need…
The two methods I have used are presented below - neither are amazing. Method B is likely better.
Method A.when applied to a wooden floor
Use grid in custom pattern to create long rectangular planks
Do again but with lots lots of amplitude and point spacing to make sub-splinters that break along a ‘grain’.
3a. The sub-splinters now created are long and normally span the entire length of the planks. This looks bad. Use the grid tool in more of a brick pattern with variability turned up, so that it unevenly chops up the planks and sub-splinters. This way everything doesn’t fracture into incredibly long splinters when hit, but something closer to a wooden shard instead.
or
3b. This method can possibly turn out better if you just increase the no. planks and run step two twice, so the noise naturally divides the splinters.
Mess about for four hours going back and forward with settings. I struggle to get meaningful splinters and not long craggy blocks. The example I give is very expensive and not my finest. it would be useful if you wanted maximal disintegration at a point of impact (e.g. a HE tank round), though you would need to carefully scale destruction indices across the levels. Often the idea of planks can be lost but sometimes it’s nicely preserved.
