R19 Voronoi Fracture Reference: Sorting Enhancements

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  • Duration: 06:53
  • Views: 3589
  • Made with Release: 19
  • Works with Release: 19 and greater

Cinema 4D release 19, adds enhanced sorting parameters to the Voronoi Fracture Generator, in order to better control the indexing of your Voronoi Fragments.
Learn what sorting is, and how to use it effectively, with this new addition.

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Transcript

The Voronoi Fracture generator in Cinema 4D release 19, has received a couple of enhancements to its Sorting capabilities. But before I show you these enhancements, I would like to explain what sorting is, just to keep things in one place. A major component of MoGraph, although not immediately obvious, is that each clone has a unique number associated to it. We call it the clone index and it's also known as Cloner ID. Let me show you where you can see these Cloner IDs. I'm going to create a Null and a MoGraph Cloner. Drag the Null in the Cloner. I'm going to select the Cloner, go to the Transform Tab, and in the Display change it to Index, and you will see now that these clones have their indices on the viewport. Now if I change the number of clones you will see that the indices increase and they will also be present if I change to any of these configurations. And as you can see, the way these numbers are ascending is very structured. So 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, then go 9, 10, 11, and so forth. These indices can be used predominantly using the Step Effector, the Sound Effector, the Formula Effector and XPRESSO. Now let's go back to our Voronoi. Delete this and let's create a cube. Let's create a Voronoi Fracture and put the cube under the Voronoi Fracture. Again, I'm going to select this, go to my Transform and turn on the indexing. You will see that the indexing seems random, and to a certain point it is because the way the indices are distributed, if I may say, is based on the way the Voronoi algorithm breaks up our object. So what can I do in order to get these sorted? Well, if I click on the Voronoi Fracture and go to the Sorting Tab, I can sort the results. Now, this is not very obvious of what's going on. So what I'm going to do is turn off the colorization, then I'm going to go and create a Step Effector, providing the Voronoi Fracture was selected, otherwise all you have to do is go to your Effectors and drag the Step Effector in here. And the Step Effector, I'm going to change the parameter from Scale to Color and what you will see now is that there is some sort of gradation, the light colors are here and the dark colors are here. You can't really see what's going on because we don't have enough Fractures, so select the Voronoi, go to the sources go to the generator and type in 300, or another high number. So now we see this really, really big mess of numbers because all the numbers are on top of each other. So let's go and turn this off and rely on the colors. And there you go. Now, we have this configuration where the lighter colors on this side, and the darker colors are on this side, and the Step Effector applies these colors based on the index number. So, what do we have here? Well, the Voronoi Fracture, and let me get rid of the points because they irritate me, and let's go to the Sorting, is Sorting the clones, actually the fragments, but they're clones now, in the X axis. If I click Y, now they're sorted in the Y, and Z on the Z. But up to this point it's the same functionality as the functionality we had in our 18 Cinema 4D. Now we have the user. If I put one in one then we have this 45 degree orientation. So the user allows us to put some values here to define which way the numbers are going, therefore define how our fragments are sorted. Finally, and this is one of my favorite, if we add any object, I'm going to add a null, you can always go to the Voronoi Fracture, and drag the null in the distance to object. And now this object defines where the numbering starts. I have an interesting scene here. So let me press Play and you will see that each and every one of these fragments just pops up every few frames. This is achieved using the Sorting and a Formula Effector. Now first of all, let me get rid of the Step Effector which only takes care of the color, so you're not afraid and these are just some objects to create reflections in a background and all that. The main things is the Voronoi Fracture, the Dynamics Tag and the Formula Effector. So first of all, in the Voronoi Fracture, if I select the Dynamics Tag, in the Dynamics tab you will see that my triggering is at velocity peak. This means that if an Effector affects any of these clones then the dynamic is going to be activated. And what I'm doing here is I'm popping it by adding an initial velocity and an initial rotation when the dynamics get activated so we get this kind of popping up and rotational motion. So once it's activated, each and every one of the Clones that is, it will start with an upward force of 120 centimeters per second and some rotations. Now, here's a question, how do I activate these one by one? Well, this is what the Formula Effector is doing. And basically I'm going to the parameter and I'm just moving it a very, very small amount, 0.1 centimeter, when this statement is true. It's interesting to look at the formulas or even search on the Internet because you'll find a lot of very useful formulas which you can use in a Deformers in MoGraph and so forth. Anyway, what this is basically saying is that if you divide our 30 FPS by 15, means 2 every two frames, one of these clones will pop. So press Play and you will see that every two frame is one of them pops. That's as simple as it gets. I'm going to give you access to this file to download anyway so you can play around with this and learn a few more things about formulas. In order to achieve these configurations where your dynamics or anything else happens one clone at a time, you can only achieve that by using the Cloner ID. So this is a nice example.
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