R19 Voronoi Fracture Reference: Geometry Glue

In Cinema 4D release 19, the Voronoi Fracture generator has a new Geometry Glue option. The name may suggest otherwise, but essentially the Geometry Glue creates clusters out of adjacent Voronoi fragments using a set of simple rules and whirls them into single pieces that have a more complex shape than a standard Voronoi fragment. This gluing function is fixed, and each cluster behaves as one solid fragment. Let's take a look at these settings and then I'll show you a nice example or two depending on my mood at the time. In my typical tradition I'm going to create a cube and this time I'm going to make it thin on the Z axis. I'm going to zoom in, bring it over here and then I'm going to drop down a Voronoi Fracture object and make the cube a child. So let me change the Display settings to Gouraud Shading Line so we can see the lines, and then I'm going to tell the Voronoi Fracture to have more fragments. So go to the Sources tab, select the Point Generator, and let's set the Point Amount to 400 and press enter. And finally, I'm going to turn off these points, which really drive me nuts. Excellent. So let's go to the Geometry Glue tab and let's turn on the Geometry Glue. Nothing happens because the Glue Type is set to Falloff and we don't have a Falloff. Now, to begin, I'm going to set this to Cluster and immediately when Cluster is selected, Cluster Amount 5, we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 complex fragments. Now let's distance them ever so slightly. So with the Voronoi Fracture selected, let's go to the MoGraph and add a Push Apart Effector. Let's bring this in slightly, something like 40 would do, maybe even 60. Excellent. And let me zoom in. And now you can see that the inner faces of each fragment are much more complex. Now, if I go to the Voronoi Fracture Sources and increase this, to let's say 1400 and press enter. Now we have even more complexity inside but the number of fragments remains five because that's what the Geometry Glue is telling it to do. I can always change this number or change the Cluster Seed, so it will create different shapes. So now, we have all these pieces which allow us to create much more complex cuts that look more natural. Let's look at the other settings. I'm going to go to the third one, which is Point Distance and to make this calculate a bit faster, I'm going to go to Sources, select this, I'm going to make this 200. I'm going to turn off the Push Apart for now. So let's see what's happening right here. In the Geometry Glue, the Point Distance says Distance zero. So nothing's really happening. What the Point Distance does, it finds the points and any of these points that reside within the range we put here are going to be welded in one piece. So let's make this 20 and see what happens. And you can see now because we have a lot of points, they all get glued except for these other small pieces. I'm going to put 10 and now you're going to see more pieces that are a bit more complex, maybe right in the middle, 15. And here you are, we have all these fragments welded and creating these really interesting shapes. Excellent. Now we have a few more buttons to press. One is the Glue Rest. We're not expecting these to rest because they're tired or something like that. Rest means, all the other pieces. So when we click this what it will do is after welding the points based on this distance, then it will weld any adjacent points which are outside this threshold together. Let's see if anything's going to happen. And yes, it does change. Now, Bigger means the opposite of the actual distance. If we say Bigger, it's going to weld all the points which have a distance bigger than 15 centimeters. So I need to make this larger, let's say 25, and you can see now that all the points that have a distance larger than 25, they will be welded together. Maybe I can try something like five and see what happens. And you can see that the whole thing gets welded into one piece. So play around with these, you can scroll up and down and see which one gives you the best effect you need. So for Bigger, the larger the number the more fragments. The smaller, the opposite. And when you exceed that threshold you will see that all the pieces are going to be welded together. So let's move on to the Falloff, which is a very interesting setting. So now, as you would remember, we have no Geometry Glue. I'm going to go to the Sources and turn off these green little dots. Go back to the Geometry Glue, and we need to put in here a Falloff object, which is normally found in the Character, right down here, the Falloff object. Or we just add a Glue Falloff, and it will add this Falloff for us. So currently the Falloff has a Falloff of infinite, which means it's going to glue everything. But let's see what happens when we say Linear, and I'm going to set the Linear direction to plus Y, I'm going to do this and what you see here is that beyond the 50% threshold of the Falloff, the pieces are going to be welded together, which means that if I move this I can define spatially which parts get welded and which parts don't. Let me turn on my Push Apart, let's set this to something small, for example 10. And here you can see the effect of the Falloff. Fantastic. What you can do is add more Falloff objects. So what I'm going to do here, I'm going to call this Falloff1. Make a copy, call this Falloff2. And I'm going to drag this Falloff here, and tell this Falloff to be the opposite. So I'm going to go and say, minus Y. And now you can see that both sides have been welded together, or if I move it around the top and bottom are going to be welded and the mid points are not. And this way you can actually separate only specific parts of your Voronoi Fracture. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can create something like this using the Voronoi's Geometry Glue and a few other tidbits.