VAT-Based Building Destruction | Houdini to Unreal Engine

This project showcases a highly optimized building destruction simulation, developed in Houdini and brought into Unreal Engine using Vertex Animation Textures (VAT).

Rather than relying on heavy alembic caches or rigid body simulations at runtime, VAT allowed me to encode the destruction into textures — making the entire effect real-time friendly and fully reusable within Unreal. The result is a visually rich, reactive destruction sequence that’s light on memory and ideal for scalable real-time scenes.

🔧 Key Highlights:

Destruction simulation built in Houdini using custom RBD setup.

VAT baked using SideFX Labs tools for real-time playback in Unreal Engine.

Smoke simulation imported as a VDB sequence for cinematic quality.

Full control over timing and reusability with material-driven triggers.

Optimized for performance, keeping scene costs low without sacrificing detail.

This project demonstrates my approach to solving complex VFX tasks in production — with an eye on efficiency, reusability, and technical clarity.