Hi there, Been trying to figure out how to breakdown a mesh inso sub-parts but probably am plain dumb and don't see the information about it. Consider a low polygon mesh, rock, for example, generated using noise from a sphere in any 3d modelling package. What would be a good break-down algorithm that will split original mesh into sub-meshes? Sort of like if you hit a rock with pickaxe it will break up into smaller pieces? Additional parameters such as point of impact plus strength can be considered, but not really necessary. My first idea was to use planes to "cut" a mesh along lines of plane intersections, but that would generate additional vertices. Another idea was to create lightning-like "cracks" that will go towards vertices on other side. I know a number of 3d modelling packages call it "mesh explosion", but how do they do it? Thanks!

True, but I am interested in API-indendant solution, or at least an rough algorithm it uses.

Come on, is there no method to do this? Has nobody done it before?

So far I have only found Voronoi examples of box/sphere shattering, along the QHull implementation of generating 3D Voronoi. But if I were to use a different approach, sort of generating a lightning strike inside the mesh and propagating it, a solution of calculating 3D convex hull (using QHull) for each set of vertices using an octree for space sub-division of original mesh is quite viable.