Animate object fracturing

[Mirrage]

What is the best way to create and controll animation of fracturing on object? I would like to destroy for example house from left to right or any other object. I should play with gradient in VoP or there is better option for this kind of job?

[catchyid]

You need to (1) pre-fracture your geometry first, then (2) create a constraint network, then (3) break that network the way you want (e.g. from left to right).

As per pre-fracturing: you could either use (1.1) voronoi, (1.2) cookie, or (1.3) VDB modeling. Voronoi is good but you might get somehow a computerized look (you might accept the final result, depending on how far you are from camera, how you place your fracturing points,....). Cookie will give you the exact fracture shape you want (but from my testing, it does not work for complex geometries, i.e. intersecting a box with a sphere works fine, but intersecting a wall geometry with a complex shape won't work). I am still experimenting with VDB modeling but it gives so far the best result, I just need to tweak some results to get acceptable (e.g. you might end up with a massive number of polygons to represent a simple mesh, ...). My advise is to use both Voronoi and VDB fracturing together to get the final result (but depending on what you are doing, Voronoi might suffice)

As per building a constraint network and how to create them (2) and how to manipulate the network (3), watch this https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/h13-masterclass-bullet/ This video has lots of information that is enough to do entire shot