R19 Voronoi Fracture Reference: Fracturing Enhancements - Scale Cells

One of the new features included in the Voronoi Fractured generator with Cinema 4D Release 19 is the ability to scale cells. This parameter allows us to create different fragment shapes by scaling them in any of the three axis, using a method called pre-fracture deformation. If you're wondering why we would ever want to do this, just take a look at the looping video on your screens, which I'll assume you're already looking at. Each horse's head has a different cell scale that makes it look closer to the material it resembles. Marble breaks in a similar fashion as are typical of Voronoi cell shape. Granite breaks and slabs, while wood, on the other hand, has a more splintery look. The marble horse has no scaling. The granite has scaling only in the Y-axis, and the wooden one has scaling in both the X and Y axes. So, here we have the horse's head. Let's fracture it, so select it. Let's go to MoGraph Voronoi Fracture, and let's drag the horse and make it a child of the Voronoi fracture generator. And you can see it's fractured in. Click here, go to Sources, select the point generator in 20 pieces. I'm going to increase this to 300. Press enter and now we have many more fragments. Another thing I'm going to do is click on this little icon there to turn off the points, because they're distracting rather than helpful. So here we have the standard Voronoi shape as you can see around here. I'm going to go to my Constant Shading. You can see that the shapes are pretty uniform in, not their size, as you can see, but in their overall shape. And let's go and change this. So I'm going to switch back to my Gouraud Shading without lines, and what I'm going to do is go to the Voronoi Fracture. And then I'm going to go to the object and [inaudible] the scale cells. Let me bring it up, and currently, we have a scaling of one on each of the axes. So what can I do? Well, if I, let's say, change this to 0.1, you will see that all these fragments now are slabby looking. If you want to take a better look at how they break up, I can do a couple of things, and I think Dynamics is the best thing to do. So let's add Rigid Body Dynamics tag, a Floor, right-click another Rigid Body Dynamics tag. Let's hide the floor, and let's press Play. And as you can see, now it breaks in slabs. Of course, I always want to make it look a bit better, so I'm going to select both these tags and go to the Collision and just make sure my Bounce is low and my Friction is very high, and this will give us a much nicer result. Good. And now you can see that it breaks up in slabs. Excellent. Now, let's go back to the Voronoi Fracture, and let's turn this to 0.1 as well. What you will see now is that the fragments look more like pieces of wood or pieces of charcoal. Of course, instead of making smaller, you can always go and make some numbers bigger. So let me make this 20 and see what happens. And you can see now we have these vertical ored slabs. So this is a different material. I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty sure you will come up with some great, creative way to use it. And that's fantastic. Now, I have a tip for you, and the tip is the following. I'm going to select the Voronoi Fracture object, and I'm going to switch to my Axis Modification Tool, and I'm going to go to my Rotation Tools. And what I'm going to do, it's going to be a bit odd in the beginning, I'm going to rotate this. And you can see the whole horse rotates. But if I release, it's going to come back to it's normal position, but you can see that the fragments are under an angle. And basically, that's what you are going to do if you want to create the fragments to be at a certain angle, all you have to do is just rotate the axis of the Voronoi Fracture generator. Let's press Play and see what happens, and this is my little masterpiece. You can combine the scale cells with the other parameters and let me show you what I mean. I'm going to select the Voronoi Fracture, and remember, we have this scaling. I'm going to go to the sources, and with a point generator, the default point generator selected, what I'm going to do...first of all, I'm going to reduce the pieces to 50, just to make them fewer. And then I'm going to go and say the X scale of the actual points now is 0.1. So this is going to allow us to have the slabs concentrated in one specific area. You can move this around, up or down and do all sorts of things. But anyway, I'm just going to press Play, and you will see that you can create some very interesting fractures. And mind you this is just by using one point generator and these parameters, you can add more and do a lot of interesting stuff. I can't wait to see what you guys are going to do with these new features.