Break things apart

Rubble, debris, a smashed crate, a wall with a hole blown in it. Breaking is two separate jobs and it helps to keep them apart: cutting a solid into pieces, and then doing something with those pieces.

When you need this something has to look damaged, destroyed, or made of parts that were once one thing.

Cutting into pieces

Fracture takes a solid and cuts it into pieces that still fit together. Raise the gap slightly and you can see the cuts; leave it near zero and the thing still looks whole until something moves it.

The seed is the control worth putting on a knob. It changes the break pattern without changing anything else, so you can roll it until the pieces look right rather than tuning numbers.

Fracture re-cuts the whole surface, so anything you had grouped or instanced does not survive it. Break late.

Throwing them

Shatter takes pieces that already exist and throws them. It does nothing useful on a solid, because there is nothing to throw, so Fracture comes first.

Its Moment is a plain number rather than an animation, which means you can scrub it on a knob and stop wherever it looks best. That is usually how you want a destroyed prop: one good frame, frozen.

Seat the shape on the ground before you throw it. Shatter has a ground height and it defaults to zero, while a shape built from a primitive is centred on its own middle and so starts half below that line. Pieces underneath the ground are held there, and the result barely moves however hard you throw it.

Damage, without breaking

Not everything broken has come apart. Chips knocks small bites out of edges and faces, which is what turns a clean block into worn stone or a chipped crate. The shape stays one piece.

That is usually the cheaper answer. A prop only needs to survive being looked at, and edge damage reads from further away than a break does.

Pieces cost something

Every piece is a separate thing to draw. Twelve is plenty for a prop, and a hundred is a lot for something a player runs past.

If the pieces are never going to move independently, Merge Geometry collapses them back into one, which keeps the look and drops the cost. Do it last: merge before a Shatter and there is nothing left to throw.