New in Cinema 4D R19: Join Fragments, Roughen Edges, Splinter Wood, and more with Voronoi Fracture

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Instructor Cineversity

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  • Duration: 09:15
  • Views: 21157
  • Made with Release: 19
  • Works with Release: 19 and greater

Create more realistic fractures with Connectors, Detailing, Cell Scale, and Geometry Glue.

Cinema 4D Release 19 adds some huge improvements to the Voronoi Fracture object. In this video, I’ll be showing you how to use Connectors to create multi-step destruction simulations, Detailing for more realistic broken surfaces, and the Cell Scale option to create splintered fractures, as well as a few other features and tips.

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Cinema 4D Release 19 add some huge improvements to the Voronoi Fracture object. In this video, I'll be showing you how to use connectors to create multistep destruction simulations detailing for more realistic broken surfaces and the cell scale option to create splintered fractures as well as a few other features and tips. The new "Connectors" tab allows you to automatically create connections between the various fragments in your Voronoi Fracture object and it allows you to create this sort of multipart break, and this break is being triggered when a sufficient force is hitting any one of these chunks and it forces it to break off from the rest. And to better visualize what's going on right here, I'm going to take a look at this connector object and go to "Display Inches," choose "Always Visible." And you'll see that it's now drawing our connections between our pieces...I'll reduce the size a little bit here, and as they break apart, the colors are shifting. So how would you set this up? Well, what I'm going to do is start my connector start scene here, and I've just got a sheet that is breaking up into a bunch of different pieces. And to add a connector to it, it's pretty simple. You just click on your Voronoi Fracture object, go to "Connectors" and choose "Create Fixed Connector." And now when I press "Play," you'll see that we have that multi-step break that's happening. And what's happening behind the background, in the background right here, is that a connector object is being generated for every single fragment and if I make this editable, you can see it a little bit more clearly. You can see I've got all of my fracture parts, and then down below here, inside of my connectors, I've got a list of all of these various connectors each of them connecting a different fragment to a different fragment, so that would be really tedious to do manually. And what's really great here is that if I…here let's just revert this and restart. When I create the connector here, it's all dynamic. I don't have to manually update this every time I want to change my connector and I don't have to make my Voronoi Fracture object editable. So we've got live dynamic connectors. And you can also change the properties on these. So I can, for example, increase the amount of force that's necessary for my break. So I'm going to change the force here to a pretty high value. I'm going to change the foreign front to a 10. And now, it's much as likely to break, and we get a sort of like a big piece that's sort of straining to stay together and it does. Now, another thing you can do is actually change the type of your connector. So I'm just going to change from fixed here to ball and socket. And so now when I press "Play," all of the pieces are going to stay and remain connected, but they're going to be flexibly connected. So you can get these interesting sort of fabric like effects for your fragments. Now, in addition to connecting Voronoi Fracture fragments, you can actually automatically connect objects that are in close proximity to each other. So objects that are touching will be automatically connected if you put them inside of the Voronoi Fracture object and use the connector options. And here you see it allows us to create these really great breaks that feel a lot more plausible. You know, entire sections of the wall are staying together until they hit the ground with sufficient force. So let's go over how to do something like this. I've got my Voronoi Fracture object, I'm going to turn it on and in the "Connectors" tab, I'm just going to choose "Create Fixed Connector" and press "Play." And calculations can be a little bit slow as right now, all of these connectors are sort of relying on each other. But as you can see, it's as simple as clicking that button, and then you've got a wall that is really behaving in a more realistic fashion. You can now easily make splinters instead of just fractures by adjusting the scale cell size of your Voronoi Fracture object. So let's just pop into a scene and adjust that setting. Here, I've got a series of wooden planks. And as this board animates through them, what you'll discover is that we have a very typical Voronoi Fracture appearance to these chunks. They're just individual pieces. And if I go to garage shading lines, you can see how those chunks are being made in the center here. So what I want to do is change the shape of each of these chunks. So I can do that by going into the Voronoi Fracture object where I'm making those and go to the "Object" tab and go to where it says "Scale Cells" right here. So I can, for example, set scale cells to five on X, and you'll see that they all become much broader laterally. Or if I want, I can set this down to one and increase the scale on Y to something like 10. And the effect that that's going to have is to create these longer shards or splinters. So I'm still going to go back to my garage shaded mode and play through this. And there you go. You've got these nice splinters created by easily scaling those cells. And this can also be used to create things like crystals and other structures that are not so uniform in their shape. Geometry glue allows you to take a scene that looks like this and turn it into one that looks like this. Basically what it's doing is taking all of your individual fragments and then gluing them together to create these larger chunks. So let's go into the geometry glue start file so we can walk through how this is operating. As we advance through, we've got our pieces flying in. And I have colorized them, so it's easier to see what's going on. Now, I'm going to turn on "Enable Geometry Glue" and at least initially, nothing different will occur. But if you, for example, choose the cluster option, what will happen is it will give you the ability to choose how many clusters you want and as you increase the number, the chunks will get smaller and smaller as fewer and fewer of these pieces are being fused together. I really love playing around with this as it allows me to get very different animations very quickly, and I can even change my cluster scene value here to totally change up the distribution of these larger chunks. The "Sorting" tab can allow you to create much more predictable animations. Right here, I've got a cube that is flying onto the screen in segments, and the order in which these segments are appearing is somewhat haphazard. If I turn on "Sort Result" here, I can change the index of each of my clones based on its physical position and space. So right now, I'm sorting based on the Y axis. If I choose to invert my sort here, they're now going to fly up from below one level at a time. Or if I prefer, I can use a distance to object. So I'm going to drag in my push up partner factor which is in the center of these cubes, and you'll see that my result is building on from the center out. And if I wanted, I could move my push up partner factor, let's say, to this upper left corner, and we would see that our build on would happen from there or down here in the lower right. The "Object" tab has a new thickness and invert parameter. Now, in order to get access to the invert parameter here, I need to offset my fragments. So as I offset my fragments, you'll see that they're being pushed apart. And they're currently set to "Hold Only" which will allow me to give them a thickness. So if I come in to "Thickness" here, I can now create chunks of any side or thickness that I want which is really quite nice, so your pieces no longer have to completely fill your object nor do you have to use something like a cloth surface stick to add that thickness. Now, the "Invert" option is really quite fun because what it will do is give you the parts of your model that have been taken away and you can create these really interesting lattice-like structures. And if I turn off "Whole Only," you'll see you can even get kind of a dense honeycomb kind of structure. So I'm going to turn on "Whole Only" back on and I'm just going to add in a couple of subdivision surface objects. And you can see that you can get these fun rounded exterior shapes or exoskeletons on your objects. As you can see, the Voronoi Fracture object has got a lot of new power and all of these features can be used in coordination with each other and really should be. So I really look forward to seeing your explorations with the Voronoi Fracture object. Hey, thanks for watching. If you found this interesting or helpful, you may want to check out the rest of our "What's New in Cinema 4D Release 19" videos here on Cineversity. You can subscribe or stay tuned over the next few months for more quick tips and reference videos.
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