Destruction in Blender and Unity, Tools and Tricks?

Hey there, i’m interessted in how you guys go about blowing stuff up and making things break down. =)

In our latest game (Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun) i used the cell fracture add-on in blender to slice up the objects. Which did its job but never felt like i had much control and had huge disadvantage like no auto unwrap for the cut surfaces and it often simply failed me.

So do you know of any tools to use with Blender that give you a bit more freedom and reliability? Or any good external solutions that dont tear an unreasonably big hole in ones bank account? As much as i would like to get into houdini its not an option atm.

In Unity we built ourselves a tool to bake physics animations which worked pretty well. Setting up animations for explosions is rather easy because the force only needs to be applied in an instant. But for a more slow progressing cascade effect like the collapsing scaffold i didnt find a good solution in the heat of development. So i wrote a little script that checks nearby rigidbodies for movement and if a certain threshold is reached they activate themsleves.
Which worked fine in this case but is extremely limited.
There are surely more sophisticated solutions out there =) Any suggestions?

Thanks a lot guys!

No idea of your budget, but last time I saw CaronteFX being demoed it was pretty impressive: Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making

You can bake complex physics simulations offline, and play them back based on triggers etc.

Thank you i’ll defintely have a closer look at this one. Well i have to be able to justify the cost =D but up to a few hundreds should be ok.

I don’t know how much money you are pulling in, but if you are under 100k USD/year, you can buy a houdini Indie license for 199 USD/year. It includes everything the top tier licenses does.

Not really an option i’m afraid =/ 6k is way too much atm.