Procedural fracture of shell objects

Abstract

We propose a novel algorithm to fracture brittle objects that are characterized by an empty interior and thick surface (which we denote as shell objects), such as: vases, pots, pitchers, antique ceramic, etc. Our method augments the previous ones based on fracture patterns and utilizes sparse voxel octrees (SVOs) as a highly efficient and detailed object representation. In our method, the fracture pattern relies on Voronoi diagrams and is calculated on-the-fly. The outcomes of applying the fracture pattern differ from the ones obtained with the previous methods in that it solves the problem of planar faces of the newly generated pieces of geometry, allowing them to have concave shapes. Without any precomputation, we are able to achieve various and interesting fractures that are unique to each destructed object. Finally, our approach is intuitive, adaptable and fast, which makes it a good candidate for applications in computer game industry.