Rockfall Fragmentation Visualization Tool | Unity | Recent Work
My current work is focused on the development of a rockfall fragmentation visualization tool as part of a pool-funded study with a number of departments of transportation in the United States. I’m using collected photogrammetry and LiDAR data to reconstruct slope surfaces, and simulating rockfalls and fragmentation using them as a baseline. Thus far the simulation supports pseudorandom fragmentation, arbitrary damage thresholds, fragmentation of fragments, fragmenting along joint planes, reading physics data, and trajectory visualization trails. It incorporates a number of parameters controlling fragmentation, and automatically outputs simulation results into a CSV for further analysis.
The videos on this page are from conference presentations I’ve given between fall 2023 and winter 2025, with largely artificial data that I am allowed to show publicly.
This overview video combines many of the features listed above while the rock fragments move down slope. I should note that everything in this model is arbitrary, from mass to size, as we hadn’t done calibration yet. This is also not a natural rock block as I did not have access to before- and after-rockfall slope models to recreate a known block, and instead was just made in Blender. As a result the block doesn’t naturally fail, so I give it a nudge to get the motion started.
The rest of the videos on this page will highlight some of the features I’ve mentioned in isolation.
Pseudorandom fragmentation
Damage thresholds, with blocks being more difficult to fragment from left to right
Fragmentation of fragments, with blocks fragmenting more from left to right
Trajectory visualization trails