Mastering VAT Destruction in UE5: High-Performance, Directional Impact Effects

VFX & Tech Artist Mohanad Ibrahim, specializing in Houdini and Unreal Engine, experimented with building a destruction system for games that reacts to the direction of impact without compromising performance. He noted that real-time physics, like Unreal's Chaos, looks good but slows down frame rates, while pre-baked animations are efficient but don't respond to where an object is hit. His solution was to pre-simulate four destruction animations, one for each cardinal direction, and rotate them to match the impact angle. This gives directional response at a much lower performance cost. "Why 4 directions? Rotating the simulation beyond ±45° causes pieces to clip through each other. Four variants means you never go too far and make it obvious, hitting the sweet spot for quality vs memory", explained Mohanad. The system was built in Unreal Engine, with simulations created in Houdini. Further technical optimizations include a single-frame setup with no ongoing CPU overhead, a 50% reduction in texture lookups using GPU hardware filtering, and on-demand loading that keeps only active variants in memory.