Hi, first of all, I'm 100% noob regarding Houdini (and animation), so please bear with me.

I'm using Unreal Engine, but I thought my question wouldn't be limited to this engine in particular.

I'm making a log cabin for a game at the moment, and I'm now at a point where I have to decide if I'm going to build the walls from single logs, or make them one mesh using texture displacement.

My dream is, that if you throw a grenade in the house, the walls are pushed outwards, and the logs break a little. If you then throw another, the logs depart, and the roof sacks in at that wall. I saw a few videos showing animations of houses getting destroyed in Houdini and they looked really impressive.

My question now is, how would I solve the issue of the player being able to trigger different kinds of destruction. I guess it is possible to cache 4 animations, for the case of each wall getting destroyed, but is there a way to kind of blend between them? So that while one side of the roof is sunken in, and another wall gets destroyed, this side also sinks in.

I can hardly imagine that this could be possible, but on the other hand, I had no idea that animation blending for skeletal meshes can be so smooth and effective. Would it also be possible my case?

The fallback option would be to have the complete house destroyed as soon one wall gives in. That would be a lot more feasable as far I imagine. But still, the last question is, can I then interact with the debris using the engine's physics engine, or are the parts of the mesh locked in the animation?

I'd also appreciate it if someone could give me some hints for where to aquire the skills necessary to realize my idea.

Thanks in advance!

Although it might be possible to blend the animations, I think you'd run into problems getting it to look natural. If the idea is that a grenade is thrown at the wall, you could just as easily have the explosion cover a simple static mesh switch from pristine to damaged.

For something a little more dynamic, simulate each wall separately, have a couple of damaged states for the roof that you just swap out and then create some logic that says if a certain number of walls has been damaged then play the roof collapsing.

Interacting with debris can be tricky. If the pieces are too big they can impeded player movement, too small and they're using up valuable physics object ticking. What you could do is spawn some chunks when the grenade goes off that are physics objects to add a feeling of interactivity. But ideally you don't want the destruction to effect gameplay, unless you're trying to block off a pathway.