Breaking Glass: Tweaking the Dynamics and Adding Realistic Detail

Share this video
  • Duration: 07:03
  • Views: 1882
  • Made with Release: 19
  • Works with Release: 19 and greater

In this video, you will learn how to add more localized fragments to the Broken Text; use Connectors to make the simulation more realistic and finally why you should always Cache your simulations BUT don't forget to clear the caches after applying changes to the simulation parameters.

show less

Transcript

In the previous video we set up our main dynamic simulation and it looks good, but there's a slight little issue. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my Edit, Project Settings, and make sure in the Dynamics and Cache tab, I'm going to Bake this. Now the only reason I'm doing this now, is that I want to scrub and just inspect this. Because if we don't cache our simulation we can only play while going forwards, not backwards. Okay? So this is going to help me check out a few things. And what you can see here, is that every single piece is an individual piece. There is no cohesion between these fragments, and I want to add a bit of cohesion. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to rewind, make I'm going to clear the cache. If I forget the cache on, regardless of what changes I make to the simulation, they won't reflect when I press play and I'll be banging my head against the wall. Why nothing is changing? So always remember, if you want to make changes to your dynamic simulation, clear your cache please. And you'll see that the icon changes. So let's select the Voronoi Fracture Object. And something that is new in release 19 of Cinema 4D, is the Connectors tab. And in the Connectors tab, you will see that we get a Create Fixed Connector, click on this. And immediately if I press Play, you'll see that each letter retains its cohesions. So we don't get all those unique pieces. But this is a bit too much, I want them to break apart, but not very easily. So all I have to do is go and select this newly created Connector, which resides right under the Vornoi Fracture Object. And if I go to the Attributes and click on the Object tab, you'll see we have the Breaking Force and Breaking Torque. What I'm going to do is I'm going to reduce from 40,000 to something like 8,000. And the reason I found this number is by just tweaking it and playing my simulation again and again. So I'm going to press Play, and you will see that now things do break apart. And as I told you before, we're going to go Edit, Project Settings, Bake this thing, and by baking it, I can actually scrub and see what's going on. So you can see that they crumble, and then this one breaks here. Great. And then the secondary explosion comes along. And if I want them to crumble a bit more, go to the Connector and let's make this 5000 on each. And again, it doesn't mean that these two numbers need to be the same. I just do it because I just want to keep them numerically consistent. And don't forget, I changed something. Go to your Project Settings, clear the cache , and then Bake again. Otherwise you won't see the changes, and you're going to be wondering why nothing changes. It happens to me every single day. Press Play, there you go. That looks fantastic. One more thing I want to add is a bit more detail in my fragments, and a couple of places on my text. And in order to do that, I'm going to use a sphere. I'm going to set it to 50 centimeters, and what I'm going to do is make a Null. Let's call this Other Sources, and I'm going to drag it underneath. And because I don't want it to render, I'll just turn off the rendering flag. The next thing I want to do, is select the Voronoi Fracture, go to the Sources tab, drag my sphere in here. And if I select it, first of all I want to remove the points, I'll actually do it in a second. I want to change the Creation Method to Volume. And you can see now that we're creating these fragments inside the volume of this sphere, and then I'm going to turn them off. Now you can see that everything moved. And the only reason this is happening, is because we have our Dynamics cached. And because I've added more fragments, then the whole caching algorithm gets confused. So if I clear my cache, you will see that everything is going to be fine. So let's just rewind a of couple times, there you go, and there it is. So sphere, I'm going to move it to the side and put it up here. And by default, what happens when we add an object as a source, it becomes a transparent. The x-ray get's activated. But still, I think it's bothering me. So what I'm going to do is go to the Other Sources, right click, and add a Display Tag. In the Display Tag I'm going to use Lines, and set the style to Isoparms. So we only have these lines here, so you can see that it's very, very less intrusive now. Fantastic. I can even make it invisible, but I just like to see how large that area is. So I'm going to go around here and add a few fragments. If you go to the Voronoi Fracture Object then select the Sphere, I can change 20 to 100 points just to create more fragments. And I'm going to create another sphere, so I'm going to drag this and press CMD or CTRL on my PC, select Voronoi Fracture, drag this in, select it, turn off the points, set the method to Volume. And I'm going to grab this little bugger, and bring it over here. Now I haven't touched any of the other settings, so I'm going to deselect everything, rewind, press Play, and you will see now that we have more pieces. We have the attraction, there you go. We have this crashing here, which I like very much. Let's watch this one more time. And actually to make it a bit faster, let's go to Project Settings, and let's Bake the simulation. Give it one more second, or two, or two and a half. Then there you go. So push, pull, crash, explosion. Then again we have these broken elements. And yes, this looks really, really nice. And it plays in a nearly real time. So I've decided I like it the way it is. And in the next video, we will deal with texturing and making this look like glass. As far as the modeling and simulation part of it, everything is done. Fantastic.
Resume Auto-Scroll?