This post is an extension of the “Cracking an Ancient Statue “ tutorial you can find here:

Some users has asked if it is possible to decide the leaning direction of a model before breaking it completely with Pulldownit; the answer is yes, you can do it  and very easily.

For choosing the leaning direction you have simply to select the fracture object in PDI Basic Fractures tab,  then go to Fractures->Dynamic Properties tab and set initial velocity according to your desired leaning direction, that’s all.

If your initial velocity parameter is greyed out you have to set Basic Fractures->Activation to “at frame” or “At first hit” to enable it. Here a demo video of the effect:

Notice the bigger initial velocity, the leaning will be faster, so better to set it to small values to get a natural motion of the model.