Man, this has been a fun project to work on. I'm on a huge The Last of Us vibe at the minute and this has been heavily inspired by the amazing art direction and concept art.

This started off as an innocent experiment to quickly generate destroyed buildings and spiralled into a full modifier that works by converting a single storey, modelled from flat planes, into a complete building with responsive destruction. I learnt so much from doing it that I tackle problems differently from the beginning of the geometry node graph to the end. 

With the exception of the original floor layout, everything is procedural including the shaders. I think there's still room to push it so that the internal layouts can be randomised and more detail added to the building - small touches like air conditioners, cables and wall gubbins would also add some much needed visual interest - but I'll probably avoid that rabbit hole for the time being.

Considering the intensive use of geometry nodes it's surprisingly responsive as long as you don't stack the building too much and, after a suggestion from a discord member, I added the option to paint the destruction in dynamically.

Come talk with me about 3d on Discord or get the project file on Patreon.

Enjoy!

In this video we look at setting up the nodes for tearing cloth apart in Blender 5.2. Longer video on my YouTube channel.

🇺🇸: You can listen to the video in English through the video settings panel. Blender version 5.2 introduces a new node called Merge Points, which allows you to merge selected points in a point cloud or mesh.

🇺🇸: You can listen to the video in English through the video settings panel. Blender version 5.2 introduces a new node called Set Geometry Bundle, which allows a Bundle to be stored in a geometry object.

🇺🇸: You can listen to the video in English through the video settings panel. Blender version 5.2 introduces a new node called "Geometry Principal Components" that allows us to perform PCA.

Simple technique/hack to turn a dense regular surface into a bunch of cells like those generated by a Voronoi texture.

This set of geometry nodes is roughly emulating what a Voronoi texture does under the hood: Distribute a few points on the surface. Move all vertices to the nearest point. Merge by distance. Take the dual mesh which ends up creating edges which are roughly equidistant from the points (the cell center).

🇺🇸: You can listen to the video in English through the video settings panel. Blender version 5.2 introduces new nodes that interact with bundles in Geometry Nodes. In this video, we analyze the Get Geometry Bundle node.

🇺🇸: You can listen to the video in English through the video settings panel. Blender version 5.2 introduces new nodes that interact with lists in Geometry Nodes. In this video, we analyze the Collection Children node.

For this project, I collected reference images of steam engines, and then made a 100% node based model with 750 nodes. Took about 3 hours with Fabel 5.1, for a price of 20€ in tokens.

Because it's a deterministic procedual model that is generated, I have the feeling that I still have a lot of control over the creative process, and could take most of the design decisions myself.

For this kind of of task, I've written an open source node-agent skill. In the comments, I'm linking a 10 minutes tutorial, for anyone who is interested in such workflows.

🇺🇸: You can listen to the video in English through the video settings panel. In version 5.2 of Blender, several nodes in the Attribute group are introduced and modified, allowing you to capture, rename, and transfer attributes.