Breaking Glass: Adding Details to Fractured Glass

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  • Duration: 06:28
  • Views: 3010
  • Made with Release: 19
  • Works with Release: 19 and greater

Let's add some detail to the glass geometry, using the new "Detailing" functionality of the Voronoi Fracture Object in Cinema 4D Release 19. Also, I will show you a personal technique, that allows you to create faux Dispersion on parts of your glass model.

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Transcript

Now that we have our glass material looking nice and dandy, I want to go and add certain elements to the glass that are going to make it look a bit more realistic. Number one is details. What you can see here is that all the cuts are straight, so if I scrub forwards and go somewhere in here, you will see that the cut is very straight. But, if I select my Voronoi Fracture object and go to the Detailing tab, a tab which is new to Release 19 of Cinema 4D, I can enable detailing, and this will add details to the whole model and some sort of undulation based on a noise in the cuts themselves. And this is something I've made a video about, so you can go and check it out. I'm just going to go to the Noise Strength and make it 10 instead of 20. Now what happens now is that if I rewind and I render, you will see much more fine detail inside the fragments of the glass. The next thing I could do, if I wanted to, would be to go to the Render settings and in the options I can increase the Ray Depth and the Reflection Depth. By increasing these, you are increasing render times, but you're allowing more light to go through your model. So if I set this to 25 and this to 25, if I render, you will see that more lights goes through and it has less contrast, but it's a bit more realistic. I am not going to do that. I'm just going to right-click and Reset to Default, right-click and Reset to Default, because I like this kind of contrast I'm getting by the light not being able to penetrate the glass fully. So I'm happy with this. Let me just re-frame my camera this way and render one more time. And I like this detail and I'm quite happy with it. Now the second thing that makes glass look a bit more realistic is dispersion. The problem is that Cinema 4D and many of the renderers we know about, cannot render dispersion. They either use some sort of shader or some sort of fake method. I am going to show you a method I use to create some sort of dispersion-like effect. It's not physically accurate, not by a long shot, but it does introduce that kind of rainbow-ish colorization and I would say it looks pretty interesting. So what I'm going to do in this case, is the following. I'm going to drag the glass here and going to press CMD or CTRL on the PC, and call this "Inner" because I want this dispersion effect to effect the inner cuts. Now how do I expose... How do I separate the inner cuts from the outer cuts? Well, you go to the Voronoi Fracture, you go to the Selections, and you say "Inside Faces" and "Outside Faces," and now if I click here, you see we have inside faces and here we have outside faces. I am going to do the following. I'm going to select the material that's already here and drag the outside faces there, and drag the new material here, and drag the inside faces. Now currently, both these materials are identical so we won't see any differences, but if I go to my Inner, for example, double-click and say, "Okay, let me add a bit of a blue tint to my glass" and press render, you will see that the inner fragments are going to be tinted ever so slightly, so I'm going to take advantage of this and do the following. Instead of adding a tint here, I'm going to set this back to white, maximize the Brightness to 100%. Now I'm going to go to my Transparency texture slot and add a Fresnel. Going to click on the Fresnel, I'm going to untwirl the gradient, and I'm going to go and load a preset, and I'm going to go down here and get the Rainbow preset. Now if I render this, you will see an interesting thing happening. All the inner fragments get some sort of colorization. The problem here is that for some reason, the way they're facing, we're getting more on this side of the spectrum. So, let me see what else I can do here. Well there are a couple of things. I can start dragging these knots this way and I'm going to compact my gradient. I'm going to then right-click here and I'm going to double the knots, so it's going to create a second set of these knots, and I'm going to bring them all on this side. I know it's a few clicks too many, but it does cater for a good effect, and the next thing I'm going to do is click here and create a last one, and make it white. So you can see from this preview over here, and I'm going to right-click and let's make this a separate window, and you can see that we get these two rainbows only on the fringe of our glass. And now if I render this, you will see that we're going to get a bit of colorization on certain parts of my glass. Now you can control how much of this is visible or not by extending your gradient of the Fresnel to be a bit more to the right or a bit more to the left, or you can add a few other knots or triple your rainbow or do whatever you want. But don't forget, this is just an effect and because things are moving around and rotating, you will see that different colors are going to appear in different places. But, already this adds a bit of detail that may convince people that this is, maybe not an animation and it's a real glass-breaking video. So this is my personal technique, and of course if you prefer colors more in the blue range, you put a blue-ish rainbow. If you prefer colors on the green-ish range, you put greener rainbows, and whatnot. Anyway, you can do whatever you want, but this is my fake dispersion method. And in the next video, we are going to start creating a setup that will allow us to introduce these cracks as we want them to, and not have the glass broken from the beginning.
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