APEX Destruction is truly cross platform. You can author content once and later easily scale it up or down, based on the underlying hardware platform’s compute performance.

Use APEX Destruction for walls, statues, and fences, plus for more complex items like jointed objects and full buildings. The artist can simply apply any of the standard material fracture settings (glass, stone, wood, and brick/tiles) to any destructible object or adjust the standard settings to create the desired destruction behavior. In addition, these modified material fracture settings can be saved so they can be applied to other destructible objects.

Key features of APEX Destruction include:

• Artist-focused tool to ensure turnkey solutions
• Full artist control over the size of destructible pieces, damage characteristics, and destructible behavior
• Full and partial destruction support (gameplay or non gameplay-affecting destruction)
• Capability of applying any standard or modified material fracture setting (such as glass, wood, stone, brick, and tiles) to any object (walls, statures, fences, jointed objects or even full buildings)
• Cross-platform support (PC, PC+GPU, PS3, and Xbox 360)
• Ease of scalability for all supported gaming platforms
• Support for GPU-accelerated Rigid Body debris
• Support for networking and AI
• Level of Detail control - the amount of persistent destructible debris can be scaled up or down fairly easily to accommodate the capabilities of different hardware platforms

APEX Destruction Authoring Tool - PhysXLab

We designed the APEX Destruction tool (PhysXLab) with the artist in mind. This focus allows artists to quickly generate fully destructible environments that significantly enhance the overall gaming experience. Artists have full control over destructible object size and behavior, as well as different material settings. Additionally, a preview window lets them simulate the authored destructible assets, dramatically reducing iteration time for creating realistic and fully destructible environments. (see also PhysXLab Tutorials)

APEX Destruction Game/Demo Examples

Art Gallery - Massive Destruction in UE3

Everything in the Art Gallery demo is destructible, the drywalls, beams, ceilings even the wooden floors. The demo is using GPU rigid bodies (GRBs) to ensure that up to 10,000 rigid bodies can be simulated at the same time, which enables a massive degree of destruction unseen before in a game. This demo was was the work of one artist and was done in less than two weeks.  It provides a excellent example of how APEX authoring tools allows artists to quickly generate destructible worlds.

RagDoll demo

APEX destruction was used in the Ragdoll demo to showcase a fully destructible multi-material wall composed drywall segments attached to wooden beams. The walls and beams can be destroyed by throwing ragdolls at them. While the wall looks great and is fully destructible, we made the environment more realistic by spawning physical particle debris during destruction.

Batman Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Studios)

Batman was the first AAA title to showcase APEX Destruction by using GPU rigid bodies in the scarecrow level. APEX Destruction was also used throughout on the destructible floors.

UT3 Deck - with APEX Destruction

Using APEX Destruction, one techhnical artist-no PhysX programmers-spent only 5 days to convert a static game environment into a fully destructible environment. The result? A much more immersive game experience without changing actual game play.