UE5 Lyra Demo FULLY destroyable.
Runs at 60fps but is not perfect of course.
How it sort of works. When shooting projectiles, on impact they will be drawn in Virtual Textures. Then in a shader a mask is made for the Vertex Animations.
Idea of a game with fully destroyable planets using the technique
Early version of the setup
Impact actor in editor to directly see the result of the destruction
Prototype of conditional Vertex Animation Textures (VAT).
In other words Runtime Virtual Textures are used to create a mask at runtime for the vertex animation texture objects. These VAT objects hold a baked simulation of destruction and then get played on impact + mask of virtual textures.
The advantage of using virtual textures is that this is a global map where everything is stored of the map.
VAT shows a lot of promises and flexibility. There are definitely areas were it could be improved and have some ideas to polish this more.
The overall system works really well and performance is decent, something to improve are for example collisions.
Special thanks to Mai Ao!