Snowballs Destructive Mesh

Author: Zak Levine

Date: May 11, 2023

An entertaining functionality, many games include objects that break into many parts or visually destroy themselves. To enhance the mechanics of the final boss, I added this functionality to the snowballs that drop from the top of the ramp. The effect gives off a nice visual for the player to see.

The first issue was creating the destructive mesh. To complete this, I made a sphere in Blender, then used the fracture functionality to break the mesh. I imported the mesh and all the broken pieces into Unreal and set the broken pieces as children of the central sphere. I turned the fractured pieces invisible and turned off their physics and gravity. Although this was a good start, I would later have to recreate the broken mesh due to not adding any noise. Without noise the pieces are all cones instead of looking like broken pieces. 

To create the explosion, I added some visual cues first. The ball's mesh would start flashing, and there was an audio cue for the blast. I then turned off the central sphere's visuals and collision and set the pieces to active. I added some force to all the fractures to create the exploding visual. The explosion worked after I added noise to the fractured mesh. I also had to disable simulate physics on the initial sphere. This step took the most debugging to get correct because missing one feature could cause the entire sphere to implode or not break at all.

Overall, the breaking mesh adds a nice visual effect for the player and is entertaining to watch.