Beidou Road Destruction Testing (Patreon)

I wanted to post this as an update I worked on over the weekend.

I kept trying to get the box collision to do destruction but they just don't apply any damage to crack anything. So the best solution is to use a field to blow up the area THEN collision boxes will KINDA work. I've figured it's best not to rely on collision boxes for destruction too much. Like the building destruction that happens is actually the sphere fields following the arm and crushing through the building.

Anyways, the road. Had to completely redo the road here and might have to do the sidewalk too. The road was redone with a brush geometry box then instead of having the material be this awkward mesh that  wouldn't destroy as well and just float there, the road decals are now actually decals. Which surprisingly require their own material setup but it's not too much work. It also required a few more things to set up UV editing so that I could scale and move the texture around inside the decal since it was a trim of all the road decals.

As for destruction, I had to go back and relearn clustering. I was just doing something wrong with getting it all to crack correctly. What I found out was that "Cluster Group Index" is the level where your object begins destruction once that level is hit. So if you have a level 4 small destruction, the whole thing doesn't start destroying until that gets hit. And then max cluster just cuts off levels higher than it. With that in mind AND that damage threshold STILL counts and the destruction doesn't suddenly jump to level 4 and fall to pieces, then it started to really click.

This is why the road only destroying in pieces in the area I specify with that blue sphere field is so important. THE ENTIRE road is destructible! It took a bit of finagling numbers but I got something super performative out of it that doesn't suddenly destroy everything all at once.

In terms of speed, I feel like the current building destruction is fine except building number 2. I moved that building forward but it snaps back to an older location the moment the destruction happens in the top half. 

But yeah, really liking the road destruction! I need to add smaller rock particles and smoke to everything still but i'm forgetting the process again since Niagara is totally not my specialty.