New Destructive Falling Voxel System (+ Helix underscoring sneak peek) (Patreon)

Last weekend we recorded a scene for the trailer with the crane falling down on Laboratory, and the way the crane shattered felt underwhelming.

I haven't touched the falling voxel code for years and it's still pretty primitive. Currently all it does is check when the midpoint of the whole object hits the map (super lazy collision haha) and then shatters the entire object.

The idea I had today was to fracture the falling object where it collides with the map, so the falling structure is destroyed incrementally rather than all at once.

What I've done so far is divide the falling structure into 'bricks' (4x4x4 groups of voxels) that each separately collide with the map, and damage the map where they land!

At the moment the structures fall perfectly vertically with no rotation, which looks a bit funky. My next step is to figure out how to add rotation that doesn't involve super expensive matrix maths. I'd also like the damage dealt to the map to increase with the velocity the falling object, so that massive structures cause massive destruction.

I also need to figure out how networking will work for this, but given the structure is divided up into bricks (rather than individual voxels) it shouldn't much bandwidth.

I'm stoked I got this working tonight, there's still a bit of work to do but having falling structures that change up the landscape impact the battle will feel awesome.