Stop modelling damage. Describe it.
Damage authoring for game environments. Cracks, chips and impacts are authored in a browser, applied to real level geometry in the editor, and never baked in — so when the art director wants it deeper, you change it instead of doing it again.
In development — Alpha Forge is free and shipping today
The problem
An artist models a chipped corner in a DCC, bakes it, imports it — and if the art director wants it deeper, they do it again. Damage decals help, but somebody still has to author the alphas, and a projected decal box does not follow curved geometry.
Demolisher does both halves. Alpha Forge makes the damage art from a description. Demolisher applies it to real level geometry inside the editor, conforming to whatever it lands on, and records every step so it can be changed rather than redone.
The loop
Two tools, one handoff. Everything left of the arrow happens in a browser tab with no account and no upload; everything right of it happens inside the Unreal editor.
The artist's only clicks on the engine side are place and apply — no import dialog, no texture settings, no script.
Alpha Forge Shipping
Free, no account, and nothing leaves the machine — every image, blur, distance field and PNG is computed in your own browser. There is no backend to be busy and no queue.
Generate from a description, or upload a height map you already have and skip the API entirely.
Bullet, sledgehammer, crazing, dry mud, ice, chipped edge, scratches, erosion — each with its own prompt, not one crack generator wearing labels.
Drop a photo to guide shape and density. Colour and lighting are explicitly ignored.
Plane, sphere or box, updating as you drag, with masks tinted so you can see which covers what.
Height, Mask and Cavity into one texture, plus a normal map. Engine-ready, not a folder of greyscales.
Kills the faint rectangular frame generative models leave behind. Baked into the export, not just the preview.
Damage that exposes aggregate, brickwork, rusted metal or bare substrate underneath.
A zip with the packed textures, the source, a thumbnail and a manifest of every setting used.
The plugin
The main workflow. A patch is generated and raycast onto the surface, so it conforms to curvature and clips at the silhouette instead of floating in a projection box.
Placement is WYSIWYG: the real alpha projects onto the prop under your cursor, live, before anything is committed. Ctrl+Wheel scales, Alt+Wheel rotates. Flat or parallax, chosen per application.
Parallax depth is driven by the plugin; the material itself is authored in your project.
The one that matters. Every applied operation is recorded on the actor with the settings the artist actually chose. A reopened asset says "Bullet impact, Severity 0.42" — not a wall of parameters.
Damage stacks: apply, pick another alpha, apply again, each its own entry on one actor. Every decal stays editable — colour, depth and roughness tune on one decal without touching the stamp or the twenty others placed from it. The recipe survives baking to a static mesh.
Thumbnails are drawn from each alpha, so the content browser is the library. Category tags across Kind, Surface and Scale.
Validation reports what is wrong up front, rather than letting you find out by getting nothing.
Subtract, union or intersect up to four cutters from a static mesh. The source asset is never written.
Cut faces carry their own material ID, which drives the UV, vertex-colour and normal passes downstream.
Cracks grown by a surface walker — three generations, branching, T-junction termination, cut in as real geometry.
Two styles: sharp radial for glass, wandering for stress. Exports as tagged splines for PCG.
Per-vertex curvature baked into vertex colours, with auto-levels, gain, gamma and smoothing.
The wear mask a material needs — for free, straight from the geometry.
Convex-edge detection and chip scatter along corners. Works today, being rebuilt around edge runs rather than scattered points.
The rework buys precision and collapses roughly twenty-five controls into a preset and two sliders.
The two tiers
| Compared | Alpha Forge alone | With Demolisher |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Paid plugin |
| Export | Zip download | Send to project |
| Getting it in-engine | Unzip, copy, run a script | It appears in the gallery |
| Applying it | Your own decal setup | Conforming patches, stacking, recipe |
Alpha Forge is genuinely useful on its own. A height map and a normal map are ordinary textures — take them anywhere. That is the point: it is the free front door, not a crippled demo.
Roadmap
Unity and Godot follow once the UE5 plugin is finished. This is not
aspirational. Alpha Forge already writes into a Unity project's
Assets/Demolisher/Alphas and a Godot project's
demolisher/alphas today, and works out which engine a folder
belongs to on its own.
The art side is engine-agnostic by design: what it produces are ordinary textures with a documented channel layout. What each engine needs is its own applicator — the part that projects a patch onto level geometry and records the recipe. That is the work, and it starts once Unreal is done rather than being spread across three engines half-finished.
Unreal first. Unity and Godot next — the art side already speaks all three.
Specifics