Rupture FX breaks things the way real materials break. You mark objects as breakable, bake, and Rupture FX simulates every particle of the material on your NVIDIA GPU: concrete cracks and crushes into grit and dust, steel bends and tears, wood splits along its grain, glass shatters, cardboard tears with fuzzy edges. The result plays back in Blender as ordinary meshes you can render, light and export.
Requirements
| Blender | 4.2 LTS, 4.5 LTS or 5.x |
| Operating system | Windows 10 (version 1903 or newer) or Windows 11, 64-bit |
| GPU | NVIDIA RTX 20-series or newer (RTX 20, 30, 40, 50; also A100/H100). GTX 10-series and older, AMD and Intel GPUs are not supported |
| NVIDIA driver | 580 or newer (nvidia.com/drivers) |
| Disk | Bakes are big: roughly 60 bytes per particle per frame. The Estimate button tells you before you bake |
macOS and Linux are not supported.
Install
- In Blender: Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions, then the drop-down arrow at the top right > Install from Disk...
- Pick
rupture-<version>-windows_x64.zip. Rupture FX appears in the 3D View sidebar (N) under the Rupture FX tab and in each object's Physics properties.
To update, install the new zip the same way; your scenes keep their settings.
Licence key
Rupture FX runs as a Trial until you enter a key: bakes are limited to 50,000 particles and 48 frames, which is enough to try every feature and the demo file.
To activate, open Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Rupture FX (or press Enter Licence Key in
the sidebar), paste the whole key from your purchase e-mail and press Activate. The key is
checked on your computer; nothing is sent over the internet, and Rupture FX never needs to be
online. It is stored in %APPDATA%\RuptureFX\license.key.
| Edition | Users | Particles per bake |
|---|---|---|
| Pro | 1 | 250,000 |
| Max | 1 | unlimited |
| Studio (required above US$100k yearly revenue) | 5 | unlimited |
Moving to a new computer: press Remove Licence From This Computer on the old one and activate on the new one with the same key. Lost the e-mail? Use "Resend my key" on the website.
Your first break (5 minutes)
- Add a cube, scale it into a slab (for example 1 x 0.25 x 0.1 m) and lift it off the ground a little.
- Physics properties > Rupture FX > Role: Breakable, Material: Concrete.
- Add a UV sphere above it, Role: Collider, Shape: Sphere, and animate it falling through the slab (two location keyframes).
- In the sidebar Rupture FX tab set Resolution to 0.02 m and the frame range to 1-24.
- Press Estimate: it shows particles, GPU memory and disk space.
- Press Bake. Frames appear as they finish; the status line shows progress and the time left.
Rendering: the result lives in the Rupture Result collection. RP_Result is the broken
mesh (even material slots: the object's own material; odd slots: fresh fracture surfaces),
RP_Debris the flying grit, chips and dust grains, RP_Rebar the reinforcing bars.
Roles
Set in Physics properties > Rupture FX > Role.
- Breakable: a closed mesh filled with particles. Several overlapping closed pieces (a building made of boxes) are filled together and simulated as one piece.
- Material: a preset. Everything under Material Details can be tuned.
- Grain / Thickness axis: the object's axes along its fibres (wood, cardboard) and through its thickness (sheets).
- Initial Motion: At Rest, From Animation (it starts with the velocity and spin its animation has on the first baked frame: animate a throw, then let it fly) or Manual.
- Grip: holds material inside its bounds. Follow moves it with the grip's animation; Force pulls with a set number of newtons along the grip's local Z.
- Collider: an animated object that pushes breakables. Sphere and Box use its bounds; Mesh uses its exact shape (a car, a wrecking ball, a fist). Colliders move as rigid shapes and are never pushed back.
- Charge: a demolition charge. On its frame it pulverises the material inside its bounds and throws it outward.
- Weak Zone: decides where things break without cutting anything. Material inside its bounds gets Strength times its normal strength: 0.3 breaks at about a third of the force, so the crack starts there; above 1 makes a part tougher. The physics still shapes the crack. Overlapping zones multiply.
Materials
| Preset | Behaves like |
|---|---|
| Cardboard | tears with fuzzy edges, creases, sheds fibres |
| Concrete | brittle, strong in compression, branching cracks, grit and dust |
| Reinforced Concrete | cracks but the bars hold it together: hinges and topples |
| Steel | bends, buckles and dents permanently, tears only after a large stretch |
| Glass | very brittle: long smooth cracks, flat shards |
| Wood | splits along the grain, snaps across it with splinters. Set Grain to the long axis |
| Brick | fired clay: brittle, red-brown grit and dust |
| Aluminium | light metal that dents, folds and tears: sheets, cans, car panels |
| Stone | granite, marble, sandstone: stiff, heavy and brittle, grey grit and stone dust |
| Plaster | plaster and plasterboard: weak and crumbly, lots of fine white dust |
Reinforced concrete's bars are steel: where the concrete cracks they come loose from it for a short length (Bar Debond Length, 0.25 m) and stretch across the gap, so broken pieces hang from exposed, bending bars instead of falling apart. A bar only snaps once a crack has opened by about Bar Rupture x debond length (2.5 cm by default), and then leaves a stub sticking out of each broken face. Reinforcement sets how much steel there is: 0.5% gives one big crack the steel hangs from, 1.5% (the preset) spreads cracking out and bends as a unit.
An object without a material gets a plain one that looks like its preset (clear glass, grey stone, red brick...). Fresh breaks get their own look: stone, concrete and wood break lighter and matt, torn metal is bright, broken glass stays glass. Set Crack Material to use your own.
The unbroken surface keeps your model's exact shape (curves, bevels, slopes), not the particle grid's steps; only fresh breaks show the grid's scale.
Materials use real units (Pa, kg/m³, J/m²). A thin sheet needs at least 2 particles through its thickness; give flat planes a Solidify modifier.
Resolution, Preview and bake time
Resolution is the particle spacing. Halving it gives 8x the particles and about 16x the bake time. Start coarse.
Preview (next to Resolution) bakes at twice the spacing, about 16x faster, into its own folder. Use it to check timing and framing; switch it off to see and bake the full version.
Speed Up scales stiffness and toughness together: bakes run faster and parts still break at the same stretch, but impacts look softer and gravity is relatively stronger. Keep 1 for anything that falls or carries its own weight.
A long bake saves a checkpoint every 10 minutes. If Blender or the PC crashes, or you cancel, press Resume to continue instead of starting over.
Dust
After baking, press Bake Dust in the Dust box. Rupture FX simulates the air: dust comes out of
the material where it crushes, collapsing structures push the air out, and the cloud billows,
rolls along the ground, mixes into the surrounding air and settles. Wind and Wind Direction
set a steady breeze that carries it away (use 0 indoors). The cloud appears as a volume object
(RP_Dust) with its own material; Render Density changes how thick it looks without
re-baking. Dust Voxel sets the detail; the amount of dust stays the same.
Motion blur and export
Motion blur works in Cycles: enable Render Properties > Motion Blur. Rupture FX moves the mesh along its velocities between frames so fast debris and falling pieces blur correctly.
Alembic (next to Estimate) exports the baked result, including debris and rebar, for other programs and game engines.
Units
Rupture FX simulates in metres. Keep Scene > Units > Unit Scale at 1.0 (you can still display centimetres with the Length setting). Model at real size: a 3 m wall should be 3 m.
Troubleshooting
| Message or symptom | What to do |
|---|---|
| Your GPU is not supported | Rupture FX needs an NVIDIA RTX 20-series or newer |
| No NVIDIA GPU found | Check the GPU is NVIDIA and its driver is installed |
| Your NVIDIA driver is too old | Install driver 580 or newer from nvidia.com |
| Not enough GPU memory | Raise Resolution, bake fewer objects, close other GPU programs |
| The bake needs about N GB of disk | Free space, pick a Cache folder on another drive, or raise Resolution |
| ... produced no particles | The mesh must be closed and at least two Resolution steps thick |
| Rupture FX simulates in metres | Set Unit Scale to 1.0 |
| Everything falls apart instantly | Speed Up is too low for a heavy structure, or pieces overlap colliders at the start |
| Blender is slow while baking | Bakes use the GPU fully; avoid heavy viewport rendering meanwhile |
The cache folder holds bake.log, with one line per frame, which helps when you report a
problem.