Hi, so i was thinking it might be cool to use the Varonoi Fracture and then somehow turn the resulting pieces into RBD objects in unity. Is that a thing I can do with Engine?

Obviously it's easy to make the fractures, but how would i turn the pieces into separate gameobjects?

If you put each piece in a separate group they will, by default, come into Unity as separate GameObjects. Furthermore, if you prepend each of these groups with “rendered_collision_geo_”, you will also get a Mesh Collider comp. added to each piece.

For example:
rendered_collision_geo_piece1
rendered_collision_geo_piece2
…

not too shabby, I gotta say!! I had a shattered crystal in no time!

So, if I understand correctly, the “rendered_collision_geo_” prefix comes from the Advanced Settings window of Houdini Engine Unity, right?

Now, it was a snap to bake out the pieces and then add the RBD component to them, but I'm thinking what if i wanted to have a more customized output?

obviously, it's very expensive to have a bunch of RBD objects with mesh colliders all over the place. So I guess i can write a script in unity to disable the RBD once the objects stop moving.

It would definitely be nice to have the RBD component already on Gameobjects before I bake them. then i could see the effect in the game engine while customizing the look in Houdini Engine. Is that possible now?

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Also, I gotta say that this is pretty freaking cool. Honestly, the reason I started learning Houdini was I saw a picture of a fractured castle wall on the SideFX website a few years back. I was thinking that would be really powerful for making video game art. Now, here I am actually doing it! thanks

It's not a bad idea! I'm assuming you're talking about the Rigidbody component?

Shoot an email to support@sidefx.com and tell them you wish to submit an RFE for this. Add as much detail as to what you want the behaviour to be as you can.