Fracture generation using Voronoi polygons

From 1989 to 1992 I did research that led to an MS thesis, on the use of Voronoi polygons for fracture generation. It is indexed in this collection.

Thesis abstract:

Cracking is one of the most ubiquitous phenomena in nature. It is desirable to computer graphically model
cracking and fracture, for the purposes of realistic scene generation, animation, art, and virtual reality 
applications. The current research describes methods to generate crack patterns and fracture on arbitrary 
surfaces composed of planar polygons. Cracks and fragments are generated along the edges of Voronoi polygons 
that are used to tessellate the given surface.

Here is a PDF of my thesis, created from scans of a printed copy from '92 [the file is 7.39M, apologies for the big size].

In 2002 I published a SIGGRAPH sketch on the subject.

The sketch has since been referenced by:

• http://www.cs.usask.ca/~mould/papers/crack.pdf
• http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~blob/pdf/batik.pdf
• http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=965564

Voronoi polys for fracture have been used in the following movies:

• Sinbad (DreamWorks, 2003)
• Cars (Pixar, 2006)