I’m trying to create a building using geometry collections but am facing problems.
What is particularly annoying is that stacked geometry collections collapse easily. As the number of fractures increases, the building becomes weaker and even a small impact can destroy the entire building.
If i use an anchor field to prevent this, the area covered by the field will become indestructible and the debris will float in the air.
I looked for tutorial videos but all I could find were videos on destroying single meshes, or how to 3D model entire buildings into giant collections to destroy.
How can I create buildings using any combination of geometry collections?
Hi @Extrahdmi ,
I did a bit of research based on what you mentioned and found something that I think could help with what you’re trying to do—creating modular destructible buildings using Geometry Collections in Unreal.
This tutorial from the Epic Games community shows how to build a modular destruction system from scratch:
What’s great about it is that it doesn’t focus on just blowing up a single giant mesh (like most of the videos out there). Instead, it teaches you how to build buildings from individual modular pieces like walls and columns. Each one becomes its own Geometry Collection, and the tutorial also shows how to use Anchor Fields in specific spots ,like the base of support pillars to prevent, the whole thing from collapsing or having debris floating in the air after destruction. It also covers how to set up clustering and tweak the physics settings to make the whole structure more stable, even when you’re combining lots of parts.
In case you want to dig a little deeper, here’s the official Chaos Destruction documentation as well:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/chaos-destruction-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.0
That should give you everything you need to start building modular, realistically destructible structures without the issues you were running into.
Hope it helps!
Hello.
I know this video very well. I’ve watched it many times.
However, this is a model that has been pre-assembled in Blender, imported as individual meshes, and then fractured, which is a little different from what I want to do.
What I want to do is to fracture modular pieces, like the 400x400 Wall that comes with the starter content, and then combine them later to create a building.
Hi I am facing same problem, any luck ?
Hi. Unfortunately, it’s not going very well.
The only idea that worked for me was to disable Enable Damage from Collision and add Strain via Blueprint. Collisions are completely uncontrollable, so we’ve made the Point Damage event generate strain at the point of impact.
However, doing so will prevent the Chaos Break Event from occurring due to a bug. Chaos Destruction is sucks.
Also, Never use the Hit event. Each fracture generates a hit event simultaneously, creating a tremendous load.
I built my building destruction system using Apex Destruction in UE 4.26
Learning how to create custom destructible chunk collisions was crucial in the process:
These are the destructible mesh’s settings:
In my house BP, I use OnComponentFracture on each destructible mesh component to perform VFX, SFX and health deduction of the house.
I use this little snippet to reset destructibles to default when rebuilding. It’s a bit poppy but with a small destructible size and with the scaffolds up, it works out good enough for me:
One crucial aspect of my system is that a static mesh base is required for the destructibles to anchor to, top part is the BP containing destructibles and bottom part is a static mesh. The static mesh cannot be part of the BP, it must be part of the world:
I’m guessing the same methodology would apply to Chaos Destruction too but being in 4.26, I don’t have access to it.
Ah, good old Apex Destruction. This has already been removed in UE5 and the workflow is quite different.
As of 2025, fracturing is automated by Dataflow, and you can easily become destruction-ready by simply specifying a Static Mesh. Also, with the recent implementation of PCG, it is now possible to build buildings of any size and as many as you like. So there is no problem with destruction. (So, technically, the question has been answered)
Most of the current problems is due to bugs and glitches. The field system solidifies fractures, events stop firing, and crashes when connecting Dataflow nodes, and more.
It’s been years and plugin developers still don’t care about this. Even if we try to find a solution, we will encounter another bug and be stuck.
The core problem with UE5 is the myriad of bugs and glitches that are beyond our ability to fix. So we’re practically sitting ducks till Epic provides a fix or yet, another UE5 sub-version.
Forced to work on UE5 for client projects because they have a hard time understanding UE4 does everything that UE5 can do and the new shiny bits and bobs are not relevant to their project, but heck, I hate working with that version every minute I have to spend on it.
I don’t think I’ll ever meh-grade to UE5 for my personal project.
try to use different damage thresholds and also i would recommend to create more chunks this way it wont crumble easily, you can try to use voronoi lets say 3 times, then flatten to sinmgle level then you can set custom level per chunk this way you can control how many you have per level and set damage per level, it will need some testing to find correct dmg thresholds, default ones might not be best. Also you could try to use Kinetic type instead of Dynamic object and then in your bp on hit to change type to dynamic
I actually created separate chunks in Blender for the building and imported them rather than automated creation through Unreal. It’s a painstaking process but the results are quite nice. it also allows me finer control over textures and UVs. Combined with some logic for when and where to spawn different kinds of particle systems and some optimization, the results are exactly what I’ve been aiming for