Breaking Glass: Modeling and Fracturing Glass Text

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  • Duration: 05:53
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Using a Text Spline and an Extrude Generator, we will create a solid text object and then Fracture it with a Voronoi Fracture Generator. Furthermore, we will use Subdivided mode on our Text Spline in order to create evenly spaced geometry, and although not essential, it does help with Voronoi Fracture Detailing, as we will see in a later video.

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Transcript

In this video we will model and fracture our text, the text that's going to be made of glass. So, let's go and create a text spline. Let's type Breaking. Let's align it in the middle and select a nice typeface, a nice thick one. I prefer the one called Impact. And our text is ready. Now let's go and add an Extrude Generator, make the text a child of the Extrude Generator. And I'm going to change my display to Hidden Lines. I find it more comfortable to work this way. Now, there are a couple of things we need to do. And if we zoom in here, you will see that all the rounded parts of our text have a lot of sub-divisions. And that amount of sub-divisions, I think, is too much for what we are trying to do. Now, you can see that we can see the grid. I'm going to get rid of it, because it irritates me, like many other things. For example, the Horizon Line. Let's go and delete the Horizon Line because I'm very irritable. So all these little things just distract me, and I just want to watch cat videos on YouTube. Anyway, so let's go back to our sub-divisions here. In order to make these fewer, I'm going to utilize the Text Splines intermediate point setting. And currently it's set to adaptive. Adaptive keeps straight lines straight without any sub-divisions, and just sub-divides the curvature based on an angle threshold. I want to be able to control the straight lines and the curve with one setting, so I'm going to use the fantastic sub-divided. And the sub-divided uses two numbers. One is the angle, which controls as you can see, and let me bring this in by changing the angle you control the number of sub-divisions on the curved parts. And by changing the maximum length, you can control the number of sub-divisions on the straight parts. And I think that these two numbers work fine for what I'm trying to do. We have fewer lines, therefore we're going to have fewer possible issues. The next thing I'm going to do is go to my Extrude Generator. Go to the Caps Tab and select fill it cap for both the front and the back, and set the radius to one and one. And my text is pretty much ready. The next step is to go and add a Voronoi Fracture Generator, make the Extrude Generator a child of that. And you will see that it will break. I'm going to select the Voronoi Fracture, go to the sources, select the Point Generator, the default one. Turn off the points because they irritate me, as you have already guessed. I'm going to go to point amount and change this to 100, so I have more fragments. And this is a good basis to begin. I like the size of them. We can add a few more details later on, but this is going to be the basis of my fracture. Now, let me show you something which is not immediately apparent. If I go to my Voronoi Fracture object and go to the Object tab, I'm going to offset these by about three. And you will see that the letters are hollow. And to make it more obvious, I'm going to turn on my Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, and now it's very obvious that these are hollow. And that is because by default, when you use an Extruded Generator, the object is broken up into caps, the thickness and the other cap, and all sorts of other little bits and pieces. All you have to do is go to the Extrude Caps tab and go down here where it says Create Single Object. Click on that, and immediately you will see that because now our extruded text is one single object, the Voronoi Fracture could break it up into nice blocks. Excellent. Go back here and let's just double click and zero out our Offset Fragmentation. Fantastic. And I shouldn't say Offset Fragmentation, my Fragment Offset. The last thing I want to do is the following. If I render this, you will see that we have these odd roundings. Now forget about the color, which I'm going to turn it off and render one more time. And what I'm going to do is make the Voronoi Fracture generate a gray color. We are going to override this by adding our glass texture later on, but for now I'm just going to make it a bit darker. And you can see we have these artifacts here. This doesn't look straight, and the reason is since we made this a single object, the Phong tag is trying to round this. And there's one thing we can do to fix this. Just go here and put a lower number. I'm going to add something like 14.2. And I just added the point two to make you wonder why I did. I could actually leave that as 14 degrees and it wouldn't make a difference. But it's always nice to just add some random details in there, just to mess with you. I'm sorry, but that's who I am. Anyway, and now you can see that the faces are nice and flat, and we don't have any rendering artifacts. So, we are done with the modeling and we will proceed in the next video to adding dynamics, and some sort of dynamic, exploding motion to the broken text.
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