Earthquake Destruction
Procedural collapse of wooden houses for a UE5 film
A realistic earthquake collapse of traditional Japanese wooden houses, built procedurally in Blender and delivered as a ready-to-render Unreal Engine 5 shot.
- Client
- Government
- Services
- Technical Art, Niagara & VFX (Simulation), Pipeline and Workflow
- Tech stack
- Blender, Unreal Engine 5
Our Involvement
- Procedural collapse in Blender Geometry Nodes, with no physics simulation: one 0–1 parameter drives the whole collapse, so timing and look are easy to direct
- The timber frame behind the walls is generated automatically (posts, beams, braces, floors, ceilings, partitions and furniture), so every part breaks, falls and scatters, and the roof tiles follow the collapse
- Three collapse modes from one setup: ground-floor collapse, leaning and pancake collapse, modelled on footage of real collapses
- Baked to geometry caches and delivered as an Unreal Engine 5 Sequencer shot, with camera shake matched to a seismic waveform
- Dust from the collapsing buildings with Niagara particles rendered into volumetric fog, timed to the collapse