Sorry for what must seem like a ridiculous question to many of you, but I've been messing with this all day and I can't figure it out.

So basically I set up my destruction geometry, let's say a basic Box that I shatter into 50 or so pieces. I turn it into an RBD Fractured Object, then add a ground plane, hit play…so far so good!

Then I hit the Debris shelf tool with my Box selected, hit play, once again everything is working as expected.

So then I go to render, and my box is now surrounded by spheres….hmmm.

Next step, perhaps I need to assign a material to my Debris geometry? How about a Billowing Smoke shader? Nope. Fireball? Nope.

Remove my material from Debris…back to the spheres….hmmmm.

I must be overlooking something terribly obvious because I know the Houdini developers didn't really want Debris to look like a bunch of spheres…

The Houdini manual doesn't offer much insight either: http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/shelf/debris.html [www.sidefx.com] and I can't seem to find much in the way of destruction tutorials that also cover debris.

Basically all I'm trying to do is make my destruction scene more realistic and messy than just the simple geometry breaking apart.

So what am I doing wrong? Or is this not the intended purpose for Debris?

Many thanks!

I'm not sure about Debris but if you are getting spheres on the render and not on viewport, it sounds like it's point rendering with a large pscale.

I think I found some answers in this tutorial video that clarified it a bit for me that I need to run a Pyro solver on my Debris Source. Now it's behaving and rendering as expected.

Need to continue to research a bit more on what does what, but I'm feeling like I'm making progress.

Hey I understand what you say,
Look add a point node in debris node then select the psacle option and type the lowest value untill you got what you want….