Cinema 4D Tutorial - Creative Ways to Use Voronoi Fracture

hey everybody its EJ from eyes on comm and I got a fun one today we're gonna talk about using the Verona fracture to not just bust things up into smithereens but to use it in creative way to create some cool organic ribbon type effects build it procedurally we're gonna light we're gonna texture it and show you how to build it from scratch let's check it out [Applause] [Music] all right so here is what we're gonna be making today with any luck and it looks something like this but utilizing the power of the Voronoi fracture and kind of thinking outside of the box as far as what it can do and what kind of cool abstract stuff in compositions you can make with it so I'm gonna start by how I built this procedurally and then at the end of the tutorial I'm going to get to texturing and lighting so if you want to stick around for that be happy to have you joining me with that part of the process so here is the finished product let's go to a brand new composition here and the first step is to grab a piece of geometry that you want to you know ribbon if I or whatever we're calling that to you know apply the fracturing effects so what I did was I just went to the content browser trusty old content browser and in the presets if you navigate all the way down to the sculpting folder here there is this base meshes folder we have a lot of base message meshes that are used for sculpting okay so a lot of stuff here you can pick whatever you want I'm gonna kick the generic head bust it's ambiguous is it a man is it a woman I don't know let's just use that and there we go so there's our generic head bus you're gonna see it's very small on our scene because it's kind of scaled to real-world coordinates so let's kind of just so the the effects in the fracturing will will make sense on this let's just scale this guy up there guy or girl scale this person up pretty bigs we never get a big generic head in our scene and you know as you do that's that's what you you add and let me just take I'm just gonna delete this material this sculpt material just have our base clay texture here and just go from there all right so it's pretty you know low poly if I go to my display quad shading you're gonna see it's very low poly mess because it's a base mesh so what we can do is before we even go any further we can go and just place this in a cloth surface just kind of smooth that out for now okay so we have our cloth surface and it's just subdividing it once so this is a nice procedural way to subdivide an object so we have more geometry to play with here all right so let's go ahead get out of our garage shading lines and let's let's fracture this person and we're gonna do that going to the mograph menu grabbing our Voronoi fracture we're just gonna place our cloth surface with the generic head bust underneath and even for the time being we just turn that off for now so it calculates a little bit faster and we can start to play with our Veroni and what we'll do is kind of check out what's going on so we have this fractured Voronoi cell pattern that is there by default because in our sources tab we have that kind of point generator going on so every place there's a point there's that little cell pattern what we're gonna do is we want to be a little bit more creative with this and not use the default point generator so I'm going to do is just select this source and delete it okay and what we're gonna do is just create our own new source to kind of divvy up and fracture or objects so we don't want that cell pattern so what I'm going to do is grab my just grab a matrix object what this allows you to do if you drag and drop this matrix object in the sources tab you can see that whoops accidentally move my Veroni if I move this fracture or this matrix object up you can see wherever a little matrix is or matrices is there will be a nice little fracture and using a matrix object like this allows for nice kind of cubic fracturing here which is pretty cool so what we can do is change this mode from grid array to something like linear and if I just move this to the right you can see we have three matrices here and if I move this all the way to the bottom of our model and if I just go ahead and just bring up the Y here you can see we have three cuts to coincide with our three matrices here but what I want to do is kind of up the count slice this up a whole bunch and what do is just up the count but what this is gonna do is just keep bringing keep adding counts keep adding matrices that are 212 centimeters apart from each other in the wine what I want to do is not have each of these matrices built for step I want to change this to end point so what this allows me to do is if I put in that original 212 I believe what this allows me to do is basically control where the start and end of those matrices start in N and then just fill in the gaps there something like that so now you can see I have a whole bunch of slices going on there which is nice I think what I want to do is maybe even make our bust a little bit bigger something like that and just bring up the matrices here so we have a lot more ribbon or a lot more slices going on this is this is all well and good all right so what I want to do now is make this a little bit more interesting I'm just gonna rotate my fracturing so it's a little bit more diagonally you can see we got these really cool kind of waves that are following the contour of our object it looks a lot more interesting than just straight up vertical slicing okay so what I can do now is go into the Voronoi fracture go into the object tab and what I want to do is offset these fragments and what this is gonna allow me to do if I just put in a value of 1 it's basically it's almost like creating a topographical map kind of thing which is really cool in itself but we have these nice little gaps in between all of our slices which is really really awesome and you can see that they're filled in there they're they're solid slices here but one thing that's cool one thing we can do to make this and turn this into a hollow object and make this look a lot more like ribbons is going into this hall only option and checking that on what that's gonna do is just allow us to see the hull or the outside of that fractured shape so all these slices we can now see through and you know see through our objects so this looks a lot or ribbony which is really cool so this is kind of cool by itself but let's kind of push this effect a little bit more and the first thing I want to do is just double click on this top circle here to hide it from view so we no longer see our little matrices kind of showing up there and being distracting and what I want to do is add a little bit more because I'm loving these little waves but there's not enough in to get more of those kind of wavy undulations I'm going to add a displaced áformer to kind of add some of that organic displacement there so I'm just gonna grab my displacer in the deform Ren you drag and drop this as a child of the generic head bust object and what I need to do to have this work is load up a shader in my shader field in the shading tab of my displacer so what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna grab a noise to start out with you're gonna see this nice undulation if I go into my display sir's object tab I can go ahead and up the strength of this and you're gonna see a whole lot of distort distort meant going on in or displacement I guess distort meant that's not a word you get you kind of see what's going on we're getting all these nice little ripples and stuff like that and this is where you wanna turn back on your cloth surface maybe add a second subdivision just to smooth everything out you can see this kind of psychedelic kind of cool effect right there reminds me of like the painted rocks and Utah or something looked at a really cool national park but really cool stuff going on adds a lot more detail but the thing is we're losing we're totally losing our generic head we have no idea what this looks like this could be a poop emoji for all we know so what we want to do is try to maintain the outer shell of our figure and how we can do that is a number of things is kind of taming down the noise first off but one thing we can do is by default the displacer is pushing and pulling the geometry in a positive and negative manner so we're making indents and we're also making bulges on the geometry so it's pushing and pulling the surface and that's because it's set to intensity Center now if I choose just intensity what you're gonna see is our little figure gets kind of fat because it's just pull pushing the displacement in one direction not both so it's actually pushing it in at a height of 40 centimeters so that's why our whole entire object got a little bit thicker if I go ahead and make this say a negative value of say you know negative 30 like my round numbers you can see that we're kind of just really smooshing the sin really indenting and displacing inwards of our object now what we can do now is go into our noise shader and start messing around with some stuff here to get more of our form back so one thing we can do is up the global scale maybe don't like 450 or something like that and you know maybe up the contrast as well this is something like that and one thing I found that really helps because basically what I want to do is just get little dots and bulges and stuff like that not these huge little spaces of white space basically what's going on is everything that's black is not going to be displaced and everything white will be so I want to make like little dots and the noise that I found was best for this I just move this on up but noise that I thought work best is this sparse convolution and then by turning on absolute which allows this noise to kind of fold over itself we get these really nice at dots that's kind of what I was going for these nice little indents okay so what we can do now is you know I've just did the contrast I can adjust the brightness to make those indents a little bit bigger and see all this really really cool patterns these little swirls going on really really cool stuff so now we can just kind of play around with like maybe the relative scale of our displays or of our noise here that's causing the displacement maybe just the scale on the Y and maybe the scale on the Z you know and all of these values are really going to determine how this looks okay and one thing you can also do is you know maybe get less of those little dots showing up so we're moving these white little endian you can see that you know we're getting this deformation in the jaw which looks rather creepy rather than cool so we can also adjust the seed until we come across a noise pattern that you know we think looks pretty good and still again maintains that outer form and again doesn't look anything too too creepy something like that let's just call that knock not all that creepy even though this indents kind of creeping me out ya know see ya the-the-the see just totally changes everything so pushing and pulling kind of do it at your own peril so I think this is a little bit more normal not so creepy digging it maybe add a little bit more there we go so we got all this really cool distortion stuff happening there I could tweak this forever I'm gonna spare you that but let's move on at least you know that you know you can play around with the noise and you know that does a lot as far as how this looks and as well as you know how much you indent how much this distortion height is in this place er let's just do let's do 35 again now this is looking pretty good but again we can add a little bit more interest to this just like we added the displacer we can go ahead and maybe have so some of these little ribbon slices are kind of floating off it looks like it's falling apart or unraveling in some way so what we can do and the great part about the Varela noise fracture is we can use effectors on it so what I'm gonna do is go to my mograph effect your menu and go to random okay there it is and you can see that everything is kind of distorted and stuff like that but what we can do is go and grab a different fall-off shapes right now it's just affecting all the little slices if I choose something like box I can adjust this fall off to just affect the portions inside of my fall-off and I can rotate this if I want and one thing I want to do is maybe just go into my fall off and just invert that so maybe the top in the bottom this figure will be kind of looking like it's floating away okay so one thing we can do is just maybe just make this a little bit more of a subtle effect going to the parameters tab of the random effector and just making these values maybe you know 10 okay and then maybe adjusting some of the random scale here scaling some of these up and then maybe just adding some rotation here something like that maybe not rotation in the pitch because we're kind of doing that we don't want it to fold among itself so I'm just turn that to zero degrees and so this is looking pretty cool one thing we can add to have these push even further away is to use the aptly-named push apart effector so I'll just select my Brunei fracture again go to my effectors menu and go to push apart and boom everything's gonna explode out it's because our radius is rather high at 100 percenter meters if I just make this you know maybe 15 centimeters this looks pretty cool but again I want to isolate this to wherever the fall-off of the random effector is so I could do you know the the old way of you know grabbing a box just fall off and adjusting this but there's actually a really cool way to add to have a effector an effectors fall off kind of be used by all the other effectors that are applied after it so in this case I want the random effectors fall off to also be used by this push apart effector so what I'm gonna do is in the fall-off tab just change this to none so no fall-off inside of the push apart effector and then what I'm gonna do now is go into the random effector and if I choose this weight transform and crank this up all the way to 100 you can see what happened what's actually happening is if I change this way transform to 100% this push apart effector with no fall-off sheep will then utilize this random effectors fall-off shape to also apply this push apart effector effect which is really cool so I don't have to you know kind of fart around with different fall-off shapes I can just utilize the very first effectors fall shape in the effector stack of whatever I apply this to so whether it's a Voronoi fracture or a cloner or whatever which is really cool because then I can just worry about just editing this one fall off in this push apart effect or whatever other effectors you use applied after this will then utilize that same space and random effector we transform all the way up this works with any kind of effector as long as that first effector in the effector stack in our case the random effector has that way transform all the way up and all the other effectors fall offs are turned to none okay so really cool handy tip there let's just go ahead and just turn off the D fall off from our viewport the little box so it's a little bit less distracting and cool so now we're at the part where we can start texturing this because I'm really digging this effect one thing we can do is you know if we wanted to animate this we can always go in and you know add a different type of random mode like turbulence that's actually animated and if I hit play you can see this kind of animating like that make this super slow undulating another way we can animate this is just by going into the displacer going to the shading tab and just adding you know very low value here like maybe point two so now not only does the displacer noise animate but also the random effector so we have some really nice undulation effects going on maybe this push apart effectors really a little bit too nutty there I guess something like that so again this is this is the nice part about you know having your fall-off connected you know and and having this all being procedural is now I'm adjusting the matrix object and kind of controlling the slices so just really really cool set up everything's procedural which is which is I'm OCD about I love having everything non-destructive so I can always edit the weather whenever I you'll like doing that so let's just turn off the matrix object in the random effector from showing up the random effect of fall-off showing up in our viewport and let's start texturing so right now we have just some color I'd fragments which if I go ahead and render that's what our what the color is going to be evolve our ribbons so let's let's change that and actually turn off the colorize fragments there and let's just double click and I'm just gonna create a just a white material here and go to reflectance just remove the specular add a Beckmann reflection go to Fornell grab a dielectric and just grab like a PT which is like plastic okay and just use that for a fall-off and let's go ahead and apply this to our Veroni I see we got this really nice shine to it let's go ahead and add a nice background psych one way I like to create background Sykes is to just grab a cube object and let me just undo that and just scale this up in the T key scale this up so now we have a big old box that our little head person is in there and I'll just make this fill it that and just round that out okay and then just make that a bowl by hitting C going to polygon mode hitting OH to get my rectangular selection tool dragging selecting all those front polygons are just hitting delete okay and now I basically have like a background room looks like rounded room and I can just reposition this something like that so get this big old room if i zoom in here got a nice little background there so let's go ahead and add a let's just rename this first background it's like and I'll just go ahead and just create a like a dark purple material and for this I don't need any reflectance at all so I'll just grab you know maybe a purple like that okay there's something very basic apply that to the background psyche and now let's get our get our lighting on let's just make this a little bit smaller let's add some lights so what we can do is what I like to do is grab the PBR lights and if you're if you have a new version of cinema 4d or 19 they have this PBR lights which basically is their version of a very physically accurate physically based light and basically the difference between dis lights in a normal area light because these are both area lights is that the PBR lights have all of the physically-based settings already selected so you'll see that the type is an area light the shadow is an area shadow and the details the fall-off is already set to the inverse-square physically accurate and you can see that that basically does all the work for you okay so I like to use that again if you don't have PBR lights you can make one from scratch by just grabbing a area light choosing area shadows going into the details choosing fall-off going inverse-square physically accurate and then another thing is this show and reflection and showing render which which is applied here as you can see so show and render show is solid so this actually this little area shape shows up in the reflection okay so very very easy to recreate if you don't have that option so I'm gonna do is just create some nice rim lights here and maybe make V little area shape a little bit bigger and let's just get a nice little highlight maybe a purplish highlight something like that looks pretty cool and you're gonna notice this is affecting the backdrop here and I don't want to do that let's just make this left rim so what I can do is go into the project tab and just exclude this light from lighting up our background site okay so now it's only lighting our or model if I click the render button you're gonna see Cole this looks nice we got these nice little purple hits but we have this area shape showing up in our render so to turn that off me to go into details and just turn off show as solid in viewport you're gonna see it's showing and render so I also need to uncheck show and render and now this will only show up in our reflection which is exactly what we want this nice little fall-off box shape to show up alright so let's go ahead and duplicate this command clean drag I'll just rotate this and the area light you can tell which way it's positioning by which direction it's z axis z blue arrow is pointing so you can see what's going on there and let's change this let's rename this right rim always good to rename your lights so you know what the heck everything does maybe make this like a orange e yellow Cana deal maybe something like that it maybe just bring the intensity down actually for both these rim lights I'm gonna not have them contribute any shadows okay I'll just have a main you know key light that'll do that and cool so that's what that's looking like right now one thing that's kind of weird is our nose is not looking too good so what I can do is uh just at this angle the noise the nose doesn't look good so what I can do is just rotate everything something like that so I can see the nose a little bit better there we go again this is going to change how everything else looks because I'm just rotating the Voronoi fracture but the matrix and the random fall-off we're both stationary so just be careful with that but cool I'm just kind of being nitpicky at this point but alright so let's go ahead and grab a let's just duplicate this light command click and drag let's make this the key light and let's make this kind of be the main light in the front maybe up and what I want to do is I like to place my lights and use the viewport to kind of see how the shadows or the darker areas are kind of picking up some of the details of my object here which is nice and let's go to this key light turn on the shadows for this and for this we actually do want this to illuminate that background psyche you see that happening right there and maybe bring the intensity down make this blue something like that looks pretty cool alright and we're building our lights were painting with lights here let's maybe crank this up a little bit move this back now let's go I'm gonna make we're not seeing our background so I'm gonna make like a background fill light and just place this lights right back here and have this illuminate this whole background here like that and let's just crank up the intensity here turn off shadows again I don't want this like to cast any shadows I just want this to illuminate the background so we see it yeah and let's see what that looks like looking good it's a little looking all right cold and then one thing I like to do with this effect is maybe to have a light inside kind of illuminating everything so for that let's just go I'm just gonna create an omni light okay and just have this kind of inside the head like where the brain area is this guy this this person's got a bright idea so the inside of his head is gonna be break so let's just rename this volumetric and go into the general tab and just go to visible light and turn on volumetric okay and then what we can do is now adjust the radius here let's go to the details and turn on inverse square so we're actually adding some fall-off to our light there we go we just want this to be inside of the head and for the visibility of the actual visible light I'm just going to crank up the width percentage of the scale in the Y may just rotate this and let's change the - like a orangish yellowish color something like that let's see what that looks like so we got this cool volumetric light inside of the head which is really cool I'm lumen a ting in there the one thing that's kind of getting lost is the inside because everything is the same texture now what if you wanted to maybe have the outside of the ribbon one texture like the white and what if you wanted the inside of the texture to be something completely different well we can go ahead and do that using a shader unfortunately with this kind of effect you can't change the inside faces or the inside Malphite side faces of the Verona I fracture typically work with solid objects not hollow objects so what we need to do is a little workaround and that is to go into our texture and basically use something that is called if I go to effects go to normal direction what this allows you to do is put a color on one side of a polygon where normal and then another color on the other side of the normal so if I go ahead and hit render you can see that the inside is actually that black and that actually looks kind of cool in its own right but basically what's happening is the white texture the white color is being applied to the front of the polygons and on the inside of the polygons on the inside of our little tape ribbon here that black color is going to be applied so what I can do is just go and click on the second color and maybe make this like a obnoxious pink color or something like that and then go ahead and hit render and now you're gonna see that obnoxious pink colors now on the inside of our object and on the outside is that white okay so normal Direction allows you to color sides of polygons okay so really cool stuff now I can go in you know tweak the you know the volumetrics here maybe crank up the the intensity you know the visibility add some inner distance there like really get crazy with this but you see the overall effect is pretty cool now we got this really cool volumetric stuff happening and again I could tweak this forever but again not gonna bore everyone with fats but it's just important to you know discover the ways you can utilize the Voronoi fracture in in ways that are beyond just you know fracturing things into pieces and stuff like that and really thinking outside of the box as far as that is regarded so a lot of things you're seeing some little pixelation some jagged edges here again we can do one of two things to fix that we can go ahead and just add another subdivision there to smooth everything out and that's gonna allow us to actually get a lot more detail which is really nice and again we can go into our displacer change the noise all that good stuff and the cool thing about this again I love building things procedurally is because you can switch this out with any other object very easily and maintain the same effect so let's go just have our random fall-off and our matrix object turned on so we can see where all the slicing matrices are as well as our random fall-off and let's just replace this object with something else let's go into our content browser let's grab elephant like elephants my favorite animal right there and if I just delete the eyes sorry you're not gonna have any eyeballs and just bring the elephant body and basically just replace that generic head bust with the elephant I'm gonna see it update now I can just move this on up scale it up as well if I want whoa flattened it out the axle wasn't actually all that bad that was kind of cool and just kind of move that into place you now see we have this cool elephant being all ribboned up you can you know this could be a renderer about the extinction of elephants and elephants are over unraveling or something like that again I have to you know adjust the lights and volumetric lights in here need to be adjusted inside our big ol elephant here but you kind of get the point and again just the you random fall off here but it's just that easy to be able to switch out whatever objects you want apply this cool ribbon effect again play around in with the displacement and all that good stuff is really really cool way to iterate in maybe if you're doing a series of this type of stuff you know go to town with that you know apply some finishing stuff on here some ambient occlusion so GI if you wanted to bring in an HDR I go ahead and do that use a physical sky something something along those lines just to finish this up but yeah this is a pretty cool way to use the Voronoi fracture creating this cool ribbon effect and ribbon a fiying any object that you desire so I hope you have a newfound respect for the Verona fracture object and maybe not typecast as so much as just breaking stuff up alright tiny little rocks but if you have any questions on anything I covered in this tutorial I covered a lot please ask them in the comment section below try to get to them as quick as I can and if you liked this tutorial please hit the like button you feel like what I'm doing on this channel please subscribe I'd really appreciate that and I really love to see what you guys are making based on what I'm teaching so if you make anything cool with this be sure to share it with me I love to see what you're making on Instagram on the facebook on the Twitter's on the interwebs I can't wait to check out what you made and as always thank you guys so much for watching I appreciate the views and I'll see you in the next tutorial bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 274,748

Keywords: voronoi fracture, cinema 4d voronoi fracture, cinema 4d fracture, fracture, fracture objects, c4d voronoi fracture, voronoi, fracture object, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, cinema4d tutorial, displace deformer, normal direction, learn c4d, eyedesyn, eyedesyn tutorials, cinema 4d lighting, c4d texturing, mograph tutorial, mograph

Id: RA2ZWv71yzM

Length: 32min 54sec (1974 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 12 2018