I am working on a personal project for my demo reel which involves fracturing a house. To get the wood fracture I have to scale it down in one axis, fracture it and scale it back. In my model, the wood frame consist of a large number of pieces orienting at different directions. In order to have the right fracture I have to scale them all in different direction. This procedural automatically orient, scale and fractures wood pieces in the right direction.

The concept:

1. for each pieces in the model, find out the face with the largest area.
   
2. store the normal of the face and store the longest edge as the up vector
   
3. move the piece to origin
   
4. rotate the pieces so that normal points towards +y axis and up towards +x axis
   
5. scale down in x axis and fracture
   
6. restore the rotation and transformation
   

I think the procedure is working in most cases if the pieces are not fuse together. I am looking for critiques, improvement and new feature ideas!

Hey benC.
Take a look at this.

https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/houdini-practical-math-tips [www.pluralsight.com]
Answer is inside Matrices & Quaternions.(Wood Fracturing Workflow)

Hi Tomoya,

I don't have pluralsight account, do you mind telling me a little bit about that section?
Or just point out what I could improve in my version. Thanks!

I find your project very interesting. I am new to Hudini.
I know math to do all the operations you are asking for.
I will not know how to incorporate them into Houdini.
I can do these in Matlab. I will be glad to help
chaman@mst.edu