I’d like to create an effect similar to 2 death animations that exist in Crash Bandicoot 3.
In one of them, Crash is disintegrated: all the triangle faces get separated and fly apart. A similar triangle separation is seen when he dies from fire, the triangles fall separately.
The second is a simple separation of the legs and torso. One enemy that exists in the 1st stage can cut Crash in half, which will cause the torso to stay in place while the legs walk away.
There’s the mesh data tool, but that’s not something I’ve used.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_meshdatatool.html
Also consider something more modern, like shaders. This is older documentation but has pictures. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/3d/vertex_displacement_with_shaders.html
I’ll just mention, naughty dog in 96 probably didn’t have the luxury of being able to load and swap entire meshes like we do, memory has come a long way so it’s probably not necessary to emulate that approach directly. Crash 4 uses a lot of advanced shaders for their challenge levels, very talented work they did there. But if you do anything cool with the tool please post- I’m curious to see end result!
Gamma linked that shader as well, but that doesn’t look like the proper tool/shader for exploding/disintegrating the faces
From the looks of it, I’ll probably need to copy most of the mesh data into an ArrayMesh and do magic from there
Usually modern shader displacement attempt to create a continuous mesh, to not have to deal with backfaces or unnatural vertex breaks, but this technique can also be used (funny enough much simpler) to break meshes apart.
Linking a screenshot here I made for another comment in this post, this test project I used the shader code in the vertex shader
VERTEX += NORMAL * (sin(TIME)+1.0) *0.1;(Should be noted the mesh breaks apart into squares not triangles because the normal of the two triangles in a square is equal)