R19 Voronoi Fracture Reference: Fracturing Enhancements - Connectors

A new addition to the Voronoi Fracture Generator in Cinema 4D Release 19 is the ability to procedurally add dynamics connectors between the fragments. When using the Voronoi Fracture Generator with Cinema 4D's dynamics, in order to break things, what we are doing is a pre-fracture. The dynamics are then applied to the already broken object. Gravity alone is enough to turn your masterpiece into rubble. Even if you set up your scene to activate the dynamic simulation on impact, parts of your object not impacted by the initial force will fall victims to the force of gravity and break without resistance. But that's not how real objects break. When you hit something with another thing, parts of the area around the initial impact break first, and then the rest breaks after falling on the floor, or something else hits it, for that matter. Connectors allow us to simulate this effect by adding fixed connectors between the fragments, therefore holding the pieces together until a force strong enough breaks the connectors themselves. In this simple scene, I have a boulder, which is nothing more than a mesh. I use the cube and I [inaudible] an extrusion and then I did a buffel. Fantastic. And we are going to break this apart. So let me create a floor. And what I'm going to do is just go to the Floor, and add a simulation tag, and I'm going to just hide this so it's not in our face. Go to Mograph, select the Voronoi Fracture, drag the boulder underneath the Voronoi Fracture. Good. And what I want to do, I want to make it break more on the top and less on the bottom. So with the Voronoi Fracture Generator selected, go to Sources, and with your point generator, the Default Point Generator selected...let's pull this up, so we can see better, make your point amount to 100. Fantastic. Turn off the point visibility, and what we can do is raise the points up. Raise them up, raise them up, a bit more, a bit more, there you go, so that they are concentrated on the top part of her boulder. Fantastic. Right-click here, add a simulation tag, press Play, and watch the whole thing break into pieces. Now, what we're going to do, just to make it slightly more realistic is, select both the rigid body tags. Let's go to the Collision and make sure that our bounce is quite low and our friction is quite high. And let's press Play, and you will see that it looks a bit better, but still it just breaks apart. What I want to do is make this break nicely after impact. So with the Voronoi Fracture selected, I'm going to go to the Connectors tab and just click on the Create Fixed Connector. Now, if I press Play, you will see that nothing significant is happening, other than the simulation being ever so slightly slower. This is because the connectors now...and if I select the Connector, you will see the attributes. And, mind you, this is exactly the same connector that you'll find in the simulate, dynamics, and connectors. There it is. The only thing is that the type is by default a fixed connector, so there's nothing different. Let me select this and delete it. Now let's go and create a sphere. I'm going to make it smaller, get my Move Tool, move it up, and pull it out. And what I'm going to do is rotate it slightly. And don't forget that we have the blue arrow pointing this way, which means that it's pointing towards the plus Z direction. Right-click, simulation tag and rigid body. And let's go to the Dynamics tab, and give it a custom initial velocity by adding a value in the same axis. It's pointing there, which is the ZXYZ, and I'm going to make this 800. Press Enter. Press play and see what happens now. Okay, there's not much power there, so I'm going to make this 1500. Good. And you can see that something is going on but these things don't want to break. That is because the Connector, by default, has very high values. I'm going to make these half of the default value. Press Play, and now you can see that pieces of our boulder were broken off. Let's make this 10,000 and 10,000. Mind you, these two numbers do not need to correlate, because the top one is the lateral forces, the straight forces, and these ones are the rotational forces. So they can be different if you wish to create different effects. And look at this, this is much more realistic than all the other cases we could create until recently.