how to make a weapon shatter when hit I am animating a fight between two characters and I ran into a scene where I wanted one of the character's weapons to shatter like glass when the other character slices it.
 I have used a few things that supposedly do this including the cell fracture add-on but it did never finishes they top part of the sword , but the methods I've found do not work with a sword such as a katana.

I'm hoping for a way to either make the cell fracture work or find another way to break the object like glass.

here is what happens when i try to use the cell fracture on the katana:



Here is the original katana in edit mode:
The Cell Fracture addon can create sometimes results with parts not cut out. One possible reason for that is non-manifold geometry; as long as mesh will be non-manifold it won't be broken well enough by the addon. You can test that with default monkey (as it's non-manifold because of the eyes):



The areas which have unfinished fractures are ones near the eyes and this is one way to determine where non-manifold geometry is present. Use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+M to make non-manifold parts selected, Mesh Lint addon and others. There are some certain techniques used for repairing such areas listed in the linked answers.