Procedural Surface Damage Tool

Authored in Houdini, this tool would allow an artist or level designer to instantly paint damage or complete destruction over an existing mesh in a painless way.

It's a demonstration of the power of procedural tools to shift the expectations of level design, to empower artists and designers, and to allow the creation of powerful effects in just a few seconds through the Digital Asset system.

Though this project had a number of headaches relating to debugging the Unreal-to-Houdini session sync and the apprentice license level, but has undeniably sparked my interest for Houdini and procedural tools.

As a summary, the following steps are taken:

1) Points are scattered across the surface of the geometry, based on the mask value

2) A shape is placed at each point, in this example a simple sphere

3) The overlapping shapes are voxelized, which produces an organic, performant shape

4) The resulting shape boolean cuts the original source mesh

5) The untouched surface is left untouched, while the interior is randomly fractured

6) Fully masked fragments are removed, leaving a jagged edge

7) The jagged edge is merged with the untouched geometry

As a final note, we could then populate further data, such as by creating an edge-wear mask that could be sampled in Unreal or Unity to create a gradiated effect of the untouched surface, the damaged surface, and finally totally removed geometry.