I’d like to create an effect similar to 2 death animations that exist in Crash Bandicoot 3.
In one of them, Crash is disintegrated: all the triangle faces get separated and fly apart. A similar triangle separation is seen when he dies from fire, the triangles fall separately.
The second is a simple separation of the legs and torso. One enemy that exists in the 1st stage can cut Crash in half, which will cause the torso to stay in place while the legs walk away.
Usually modern shader displacement attempt to create a continuous mesh, to not have to deal with backfaces or unnatural vertex breaks, but this technique can also be used (funny enough much simpler) to break meshes apart.
Linking a screenshot here I made for another comment in this post, this test project I used the shader code in the vertex shader
VERTEX += NORMAL * (sin(TIME)+1.0) *0.1;(Should be noted the mesh breaks apart into squares not triangles because the normal of the two triangles in a square is equal)