Vertex Blast

The Project

This is an internal project we created to test the limits of an exciting workflow we've been using more and more. The ground geometry explosion is entirely driven by a vertex shader, no baked animation used! We achieve this by pre-fracturing a mesh in a 3D package and baking individual fragment position data into the UV channels of the mesh. This allows us to manipulate the fragments with a vertex shader individually, giving them unique transformation offsets.

Using a cross product of the fragments and the center of the object we're able to rotate the fragments away from the center while offsetting them upwards and affecting them by a gravity force. This gives a very believable motion and best of all it's lightning fast, all calculated in realtime on the GPU. This technique can be further expanded on by adding additional forces and even collisions! For a more detailed explanation and some step-by-step instructions for achieving a similar result check out this Klemen's Twitter thread.