Souls Destruction Framework

Designed for souls-like, action RPG, dungeon crawler and melee-focused games.

Overview

Souls Destruction Framework (SDF) covers two distinct layers, and either one can be used on its own.

Destruction authoring

An editor-only pipeline that turns an existing Static Mesh into a complete, ready-to-place destructible setup:

Static Mesh -> Choose Preset -> Generate -> Validate -> Play

The source Static Mesh is never modified. Generation stages everything transiently first, validates the result, and only then publishes the assets it owns.

Runtime framework

A data-driven runtime layer that decides what a hit does and how the object presents its destruction. Once an object carries an USDFDestructibleComponent and a destruction profile, it can be destroyed by:

• melee contacts;
• roll, dash or charge collisions;
• projectiles;
• radial events;
• chain propagation from another destructible.

Features

Automatic destruction authoring

• Static Mesh preflight before anything is written
• Geometry Collection generation
• deterministic Voronoi, structure-aware wood and semantic barrel fracture patterns
• interior material assignment on generated internal faces
• collision and cooked simulation data validation
• runtime profile generation, with Max Health exposed directly in the authoring window — a positive value publishes a ready-to-play multi-hit profile
• optional ready-to-place destructible Actor Blueprint
• the source mesh remains untouched

Authoring presets

Ten data-driven presets ship with the plugin, plus a custom path:

Preset	Intent	Low / Medium / High fragments
Wood	Structure-aware planar fracture: recovers boards and panels, preserves small hardware, noisy cross-cuts	14 / 24 / 36
Wooden Crate	Wood recipe with convex piece collision for boards that overlap their posts	14 / 24 / 36
Wooden Barrel (Semantic)	Strict barrel recipe: body cut into radial staves, hoops and end caps preserved	14 / 24 / 36
Wooden Furniture	Chairs, tables, benches: every member snapped to a target debris length	10 / 16 / 26
Wooden Coffin	Wide wooden panels with shallow break roughness so pieces fall apart instead of interlocking	12 / 20 / 32
Ceramic	More numerous pieces for shells with real thickness	12 / 20 / 32
Stone	Fewer massive blocks with aggressive micro-fragment control	14 / 26 / 42
Glass	Thin brittle panels, fractured at runtime around the impact — no baked Geometry Collection	pattern-driven
Glass Vessel	Bottles, lanterns, vases: pre-baked Voronoi tuned for glass slivers, preserved cork stoppers	24 / 40 / 64
Generic	Neutral deterministic Voronoi, no material assumption	10 / 18 / 30

Fracture density is selected as Low, Medium, High or Custom (explicit count, 2 – 150). The wood presets also take Cuts Along Length — how many times each board breaks, from 0 (boards stay whole) to 5 — and Wooden Furniture a Collision Shape: boxes for straight boards, convex hulls for curved and leaning pieces such as pews and thrones.

Physics-ready props

New generations simulate physics by default, so a prop rests on its support and falls when that support breaks:

• smash a crate and the pot resting on it drops to the floor instead of hanging in the air
• optional height-based fall damage per profile: enabled on Ceramic and Glass Vessel generations, off on Stone and wood — a pot can break on landing while a statue survives
• a source mesh without usable simple collision gets an SDF-owned simulation copy; the source is never modified
• existing setups are never converted silently: an explicit editor migration switches them
• composite glass windows stay fixed by design

Runtime glass fracture

The Glass family does not bake a Geometry Collection. Shards are generated at the moment of impact, around the actual impact point, so the crack pattern follows the blow:

• radial-and-ring crack pattern with per-hit jitter, deterministic per seed
• every shard is a real simulated rigid body with convex collision
• persistent shards by default — they settle where they fall, like every other Souls debris
• a multi-material source (a stained glass window with its stone surround and lead tracery) is split automatically at authoring: the structure becomes an unbreakable frame, every glass island becomes an independently breakable pane on one ASDFGlassCompositeActor
• preserved material slots: islands whose material matches a preset keyword (a cork stopper on a bottle) drop whole instead of shattering

Batch authoring

• Batch Generate, Batch Validate and Batch Regenerate
• full preflight before the first write
• explicit Ready / Warning / Blocked state per mesh
• strictly sequential, safe processing on the editor thread
• continue-on-error: a blocked or failed row never stops the queue
• cancellation sampled between assets
• exported CSV report for every execution

Regeneration safety

• manifest-based ownership of every generated asset
• fingerprint-based drift detection on source, preset, interior material and outputs
• explicit confirmation before any regeneration
• second confirmation before replacing manually edited outputs
• durable package backups under Saved
• rollback when replacement, save or validation fails
• generated object paths are preserved, so external references stay valid

Modify Destructible

• change how an existing destructible breaks, right from the level: right-click a placed actor, its Blueprint or its source mesh
• switch preset, fracture density, cuts along length, collision shape, fragility or health
• rebuilt in place: every copy already placed in your levels updates, Blueprint graphs are kept
• debris, projectile, audio and physics choices are preserved
• same backups, confirmations and rollback as regeneration
• scriptable with the SDF.ModifyDestructible editor command

Runtime destruction inputs

• Melee — swing windows with one hit per target per swing
• Roll / collision — externally detected contacts with a minimum speed gate
• Projectile — data-driven impact profiles, no imposed projectile class
• Radial — origin, radius, falloff and deterministic per-target seeds
• Chain reactions — opt-in bounded propagation with cycle prevention

Presentation

• audio events: LightImpact, HeavyImpact, Break, DebrisImpact
• Niagara events: the same four plus Custom
• deterministic weighted variation selection
• wood splinters burst from the struck point, take on the broken object’s own texture and never hang in the air — they ignore the debris and land on the real floor
• middleware-neutral request delegates, emitted even when built-in playback is disabled
• independent per-frame budgets for built-in audio and built-in VFX

Damage presentation

• non-breaking hit reactions with optional bounded physics impulse
• impact decals with a per-object limit
• damage stages driven by remaining health ratio
• Static Mesh replacement per stage
• per-slot material overrides per stage

Performance

• global cap on simultaneously active Chaos representations
• budget on kept, settled debris actors (MaxSettledDebrisActors), oldest evicted first
• per-frame destruction event admission budget
• automatic Geometry Collection to Swap-and-Scatter fallback
• centralised, timer-driven debris cleanup that waits for real physical rest — debris is never frozen in mid-air
• no Actor tick on the destructible Actors; the destructible component ticks only while a profile enables fall damage

Demo content

The plugin ships a complete showcase map, /SoulsDestructionFramework/Demo/Maps/L_SDF_Showcase, with titled stands for every preset family — crates, barrels, furniture, a coffin, ceramic pots, a stone gravestone and statue, glass panes, tinted bottles with preserved cork stoppers, a stained glass window split into frame and panes, and a multi-hit wooden door. All demo content uses only plugin and engine assets.

Requirements

• Unreal Engine 5.7 — separate edition, verified on 5.7.4 (Win64)
• Unreal Engine 5.8 — separate edition, verified on 5.8.2 (Win64)
• Source-only packages: compiled with Unreal’s supported Visual Studio C++ toolchain, including in Blueprint-only projects
• Epic plugins: Geometry Collection and Fracture (editor), Niagara, Procedural Mesh Component and Enhanced Input — plus Control Rig on the 5.7.4 edition
• Blueprint-only and C++ projects are both supported

Full details are in the installation guide.