Dynamic fracturing on semi transparent objects.

[VoiTech]

Hi guys!
Just wanted to ask for any ideas/suggestions on how to archieve this specific effect...
I am working on animation where cracks are progressively appearing on ice surface. With anything else I would just pre-fracture object, and move gradually particles one by one to reveal cracks. Because of this specific material, which is transparent, cracks are visible straight away. I am really in the dark here, anybody ever tried anything like this? Tried to imitate cracks with extruded spline that grows along object`s surface, but effect looks really fake and its hard to match the fractures of multifracture that happens few frames later...

[d4rk3lf]

If you are using radial mode in multifracture there should be animate option, where you can animate cracks going from center, and spreading with all direction.
The way I usually do it is in post... I just animate gradient ramp, render that as a separate pass, then render 2 versions (with and without cracks), and mask it in After Effects.

You can also try with Tyweld in combination with Tyselect... or animate sphere or cylinder spreading, and with TyBoolean reveal cracked mesh, and delete non cracked mesh... but this is just a blind guess... the safest (at least for me), is post.