fluidWT

I created a test scene for you that has something similar. It should help you get started.

Unfortunately, I didn't make a video of it, but here's the basic process:

1) Create a Poly cube and set the values to what you want. It is important to set the primary creation values, not the attributes. The way Maya works, it is generally a bad idea to rely on tweaks after object creation, so I always suggest you set the values in the initial poly node.
2) Add a material to your object. Its a good idea to do this first. I added a mia_material_x and a wood shader. The wood shader was adjusted to encapsulate the entire object. It's a volume shader, so I'm sure you probably have to do something to make it track an animated object otherwise you get swimming. I didn't correct for that (an exercise for the reader!)
3) Now I used the "turn polymesh into dmm" option in the DMM shelf. This is different from using the Create DMM with Autocage option in that it uses the poly's boundry itself as a encapsulation for the finite element tools. Autocage can get you better tessellation on organic objects as well as things that seem too regular. In this case I was doing a simple test so I used the polymesh option.
4) I scaled the "z" setting of the DMM Triangulation & Tet Generation Parameters. This causes the tools to scale the z tet generation as you describe it instead of equally. Then I increased the magnitude to cause scaling to happen. I also adjusted the area and quality parameters to get a good spacing.
5) Next, I added some objects to drop the plank onto and applied a "plywood" DMM material property to the plank. This made it breaky, but not enough, so I then used the material setting window to change the toughness value. You can mess with a lot of values here. Look at the DMM material setting tutorial for further details. I've written some details on how to set up wood there.

Finally,you can add some splinters for additional detail. Splinters are a thing we invented for situations where people didn't have a lot of tet detail, but wanted surface detail on fracture. If you want, you can also just add density regions and/or increased tets to increase detail on fracture. However, you should realize that when you do that, the material properties will have to be changed as you will be adding many many more degrees of freedom to the sim.

The scene link is here for you. I'll get a more detailed tutorial at one point.

Also, the scene was saved as a Maya 2014 scene, but I was able to load it fine in Maya 2013. Ignore the errors.



-Vik