Is it possible to achieve the same effect in houdini?
https://vimeo.com/43656173 [vimeo.com]

totally possible,
you could do this effect easily with cloth, have a look at the crumpling and tearing masterclass (I believe that's what it was called), they have some example files that can point you in the right direction !
Alternatively you might be able to precut your geometry and achieve the same effect using the spring SOP and combine it with a VOP SOP displacement, would be fast and not too hard to setup!

best,

Manu

asnowcappedromance
totally possible,
you could do this effect easily with cloth, have a look at the crumpling and tearing masterclass (I believe that's what it was called), they have some example files that can point you in the right direction !
Alternatively you might be able to precut your geometry and achieve the same effect using the spring SOP and combine it with a VOP SOP displacement, would be fast and not too hard to setup!

best,

Manu

thanks!
i meant controling mesh with particles.
and tearing mesh based on particle distance

have a look at the attached file, it's using a lattice to deform the mesh.
I'm at work and busy right now, tearing the mesh should be possible, just throwing out some ideas. Have each point on the mesh know it's nearest particle neighbours on the first frame (nearpoint expression or point cloud lookup), store the distance to those points and once that distance exceeds a threshold then you can break the points into vertices and do some vop sop calculation to get vectors that move the split up points in opposite directions.

asnowcappedromance
have a look at the attached file, it's using a lattice to deform the mesh.
I'm at work and busy right now, tearing the mesh should be possible, just throwing out some ideas. Have each point on the mesh know it's nearest particle neighbours on the first frame (nearpoint expression or point cloud lookup), store the distance to those points and once that distance exceeds a threshold then you can break the points into vertices and do some vop sop calculation to get vectors that move the split up points in opposite directions.

thanks for the scene.
seems like i should wait for you being less busy