These images and videos are from an unreleased project that I had the pleasure of being a Principle Technical Artist for. They represent an in Unreal Engine tool for generating broken glass meshes as part of a breakable system. Project goals called for a "smash and grab" theme where a number of different objects in the world were expected to be breakable or reactive to actions within the game. Glass was a big part of this.

When I first joined the engineering team had created a smart system for swapping static meshes/materials in a scene on projectile contact without the use of expensive per actor blueprints. The world team had modeled some basic window plain meshes for various frames and attached simple vfx, but this alone did not meet the project's goals. Models had not been separated per pane and would shatter unrealistically as a group when impacted. They also left behind no evidence or shards.

I used unreal dynamic mesh blueprints to create a tool that would allow us to take pre-existing window models and separate them into individual window panes using boolean operations. The tool regenerated each pane of glass using a voronoi noise and remove some amount of the inner fragments to leave a broken edge. Finally it would save out each mesh as a separate asset alongside the original glass mesh with special naming properties that would allow us to automatically find and replace old versions via scripts.

Re-modeling and replacing ever glass mesh across the game would have been a week or two of world art time. With this tool we solved the problem in a day.

Gameplay Engineer - Dan Wellman