Best way to destructable pixels backgrounds and objects?

Unity Engine
1

I’m planning out a game which will have destructible backgrounds and also sprites that I want to break up into their constituent pixels. I’m new to Unity (but not game dev) and wondered what was the best way to achieve that ?

2

Unity doesn’t really have pixel-level control; it’s a 3D engine and everything is done with polygons. Technically there are SetPixel functions, but this requires uploading textures, which is fairly slow.

–Eric

3

Could you use your sprites as textures on a series of planes–one plane per pixel–that could then be deleted or broken apart to create the appearance of per-pixel control? Or would all those planes be inefficient in Unity2D?

4

How about converting the pixels in a sprite to similar sized quads (which can be physics objects as well?) and moving them appropriately?

5

You could use a particle system, but that still leaves the issue of destructible backgrounds.

–Eric