Creating the effect of battle damage on a 3D asset often takes the skill of multiple VFX artists, but is by all accounts a relatively straightforward process to work on. However, that simplicity can be misleading when faced with complex sequences involving multiple assets. Plus, most jobs will require you to iterate quickly, match your work to a plate, and handle production-level hero assets with hundreds of UDIMs from different VFX vendors.
This was the case for us at Whiskytree on a high-profile TV show our team recently worked on. While tools like Houdini and Blender's Geometry Nodes would usually be the port of call for procedural tasks, we needed a workflow that would allow for render-time damage
