Wolf 359 - Ship Destruction

I was tasked with coming up with a process that we could use to create a bunch of destroyed ships more quickly than the process we'd used before. I ended up creating some modified shader templates which took existing shaders used on various ship parts, and repurposed one of the tint colors, combined with vertex coloring on the models, to create some variable heightmap blends to either create burn marks across the hull, or eat away at the hull itself by applying that heightmap as alpha.

These materials were combined with a process of creating simplified interior layers of geometry, so that as the outer hull was eaten away, it would reveal more and more layers, simulating the interior walls, rooms and corridors that should be present on a Starship.

With this process we were able to convert an existing ship into a shipwreck in a day or two each. In all I spent about 6 weeks working on this, and we netted 36 ships, far more than we had expected, or would have been able to create the old way.

In addition, with these bones set up, we could also easily repurpose this tech, using a less noisy/contrasty heightmap, and removing burns marks, to simulate ships that are under construction. Or we could replace the burn mark layer with other things. . . rusty ships? borgified ships? Lots of possibilities now that we have this available to us.