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I have seen some Voronoi shatter videos on Youtube.

What is your experience with it?

What are the pros and cons in time complexity, resource complexity, implementation difficulty...?

Does it emulate how a real material would react?

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Not sure why this is voted to close. It seems like a decent, real question. – The Communist Duck Jun 23 '11 at 16:20
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Do you have some paper about this topic? It looks really interesting :) – zacharmarz Oct 11 '11 at 10:03
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Remember with game development it's always about approximating the real world, you aren't trying to create reality - just fool someone into thinking that it is. You simply don't have enough processing power to create a perfect reality. – Jonathan Dickinson Oct 11 '11 at 10:47
The way it's phrased isn't really a question. Pros: Cool looking shatter. Cons: You have to pay for it with compute time. – bobobobo Dec 31 '12 at 19:21
Tend to agree. "What are the pros and cons" questions are meaningless unless you're comparing against something else. – Trevor Powell Jan 5 at 17:54

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote

As to the last question: It doesn't emulate most of real-world materials aside from very few exceptions, and these only for some specific choices of the Voronoi cell seeds. For example, toughened glass shatters like this, since the material is "pre-broken" into a loosely-held Voronoi-like structure in the process of manufacturing it.

On the other hand, state of the art particle systems don't usually emulate explosion dynamics, fluid flow in a waterfall or fog dispersion either ...

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It doesn't simulate real-world materials, but it does emulate them, as the idea is to imitate real-world physics. – Jonathan Connell Jun 23 '11 at 11:53
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@3nixios Could you please elaborate on the difference you see between emulate & simulate ? – Takhiarel Jun 23 '11 at 13:12
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@Takhiarel A simulation is when you try to simulate exactly how things will happen in a real situation. The idea is to reproduce the events that lead to a final situation. The difference with emulation is that you are focused on the end result and not the means to get there. – Jonathan Connell Jun 23 '11 at 13:40
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@3nixios: Thing is, Voronoi shatter patterns don't look like most real-world material shatter patterns. Neither do particle explosions, for example - they emulate CINEMATIC explosions, not real-world ones. That said, they often look good enough and are certainly fast enough. – Martin Sojka Jun 23 '11 at 14:28
I guess the difference between simulation and emulation can be a bit meaningless when the base isn't 'real'. Is ot not possible to emulate real world materials though? – Jonathan Connell Jun 23 '11 at 15:17
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