CREATE ABSTRACT ORGANIC RENDERS
Learn how to utilise the power of the Voronoi Fracture object to quickly and easily create an abstract organic ribbon effect that is completely procedural and adaptable to any object
Learn how to utilise the Voronoi Fracture object for a ribbon effect, with Cinema 4D tutor EJ Hassenfratz
My love for Cinema 4D runs very deep, evidenced by being a user for almost ten years now and devoting much of the past few years to teaching artists how to use this powerful 3D software. One of the primary reasons for my affection is that Cinema 4D enables a very non-technical person like myself the ability to simply create whatever I envision using its many powerful yet intuitive features.
One of my favourite new tools that was supercharged in the latest iteration (R19) is the Voronoi Fracture. It’s one of the many features inside Cinema 4D that enable you to unleash your creativity; we can utilise a tool that is mainly used for fracturing your models into bits and pieces and adapt it to a very unique effect, like this ribbon technique I discovered. I'll be introducing you to the Voronoi Fracture objects, sharing with you some techniques for creating this interesting abstract effect, and how thinking out of the box is an important habit to get into when it comes to thinking of 3D software as a playground. Let's jump in and unravel this striking effect!
01 choose A MODEL
Grab the model you’d like to ribbon-ify. I chose one of the base sculpt meshes found in the Content Browser (Content Browser>presets>sculpting>base Meshes>generic Head Bust). These models are pretty small due to them being built to real-world scale, but we can scale it up so that we have more room to work with. I scaled my bust up around 700%.
02 subdivide your MESH
After you have chosen your model, ensure it has enough subdivisions. The base sculpts in the Content Browser are great, but will need to be subdivided a few times. Go into Polygon Mode, then select all polygons by clicking on a single polygon on your object and press Cmd+a. With all the polygons selected, go to Mesh>command>subdivide and click the little gear to the right of Subdivide. Here you can choose how many subdivisions to execute. I chose two to give enough geometry for the detail we’ll need for this effect, and checked Smooth Subdivision. You should have as dense a mesh as in the image.
03 time to Voronoi
Next, go to your Mograph menu and select a Voronoi Fracture object, and make your newly subdivided object a child of it. You’ll see your model turn into a bunch of multicoloured cell-patterned pieces. This is the base-level use of the Voronoi Fracture, to break stuff up with the Voronoi pattern. We’re going to take this much further, though! Go into the Voronoi Fracture Sources tab and select the Point Generator – Distribution, which is the default Voronoi pattern it’s using for the fracture pattern, and delete it. We’re going to utilise a different source for our fracturing.
04 create A Matrix object
Go to the Mograph menu and scroll down to Matrix Object, to create an object that will be used as our new fracture source. Simply drag and drop the Matrix Object into the Sources field on the Voronoi Fracture object. You can now see that wherever a matrix is, a cubelike fracture will be made on our object. Pretty cool!
Next, navigate to the Matrix Object’s Object tab and change the Mode from Grid Array to Linear, so that we have a line of matrices that slice up our objects vertically. Change the Mode from Per Step to End Point so you can then use the P.Y value to control where the matrices end. Position the Matrix Object at the bottom of your object and scrub the Position.y value until it reaches the top of your object. Then, go into Count and up the value until you have a nicely slicedup object. I used a count of 90.
05 rotate THE Matrix object
The slices look cool, but we could improve on them by adding more interest to this fracturing. Instead of vertical slices, you can simply
rotate the Matrix Object and have a more diagonal slice that adds an interesting type of slicing effect, which definitely improves on the boring, totally vertical look. Make sure that after you have rotated and moved the Matrix Object that it is still slicing through the entirety of your object; you may need to adjust the Endpoint or fine-tune the position of your Matrix Object.
06 MAKE some space
Next, we’ll create some spaces in between the fractured slices from our Matrix Object. We can do this very easily by navigating to the Voronoi Fracture object’s Object tab and then going to Offset Fragments. Here you can enter in a value and the fragments will be given that amount of buffer space by the fractures being offset. Insert a small value of 1cm and you’ll now see some space between all the slices.
07 clean up THE Viewport
The matrices, and the little green dots that show the fracture sources formed by those matrices, are a bit distracting. Let’s remove these from our viewport by going to our Matrix Object, and clicking twice on the top button to the left of the green checkmark until the grey dot turns red. This will remove the matrices from our viewport. Much better!
08 Hollow THE slices
This is a great effect in itself, but we’re going for ribbons. To hollow these slices out so we are left with ribbon-like elements, simply check the Hull Only option in the Voronoi Fracture’s Object tab. Now we have this really cool-looking hollow ribbon that creates the form of our object. We’re getting there!
09 Displacement For organic Distortion
The form is a little too uniform for my tastes, so let’s add a Displace Deformer as a child of the object you are fracturing (in my case, the Generic Head Bust). The Displacer won’t do anything until we load up a Shader, so head on over to the Shading tab and click on the button with a small arrow pointing right. Load up a Noise Shader. You’ll immediately see some distortion in the ribbon object. Go into the Object tab and change the Height to -25 and change the Type from Intensity (Centered) to Intensity. This allows the distortion to go in one direction, either positive or negative, not both like it was previously. This will enable us to make indents into our geometry and retain the outer shell form of our object.
10 Adjust THE noise
Let’s fine-tune the noise and do some experimentation. The noise type you choose and the scale of it can drastically change the look of your model, so this is the part where you definitely want to explore and experiment with the different options available! In the Shading tab of the Displacer,
click on the Noise button to dive into the Noise Shader properties. Here you can choose different noise types and adjust the scale. I found that using Sparse Convolution gave some interesting effects, but as it is, there are too many little indents and we lose our object’s form. Bring up the Global Scale of the noise to about 450% or so, and go down to the Absolute option and check it on.
This allows for our noise to make nice ridges – this doesn’t look good by itself, but if you turn up the Contrast to about 90%, you’ll see that we have some nice concentrated indents. There’s too few of them at the moment, so bring up the noise Brightness to about 10% or so. Feel free to play with the Seed, Global Scale and Relative Scale and adjust to taste. Remember to adjust so that there’s distortion, but you can still make out the form of your object.
11 smooth out THE rough EDGES
You’ve probably noticed that there are some jagged edges on this model now due to the Displacer. Luckily there’s a fix for that! Go up to your Deformers menu and choose the Smoothing Deformer. Place the Smoothing Deformer as a child underneath the object you’re deforming, but after the Displacer in the same level of child hierarchy as the Displacer. Immediately you will see some smoothing out of your geometry.
You can adjust the smoothing to taste – I changed the Stiffness value to about 90% to smooth things out just a touch, while again trying to maintain the overall detail of the outer shell of our object. As we can see, just that small amount of smoothing went a long way and helped to remove all of those ugly jagged edges.
12 ANIMATE THE ribbons
Now that your model looks good with the Fracturing, Displacer and Smoothing, we need to add a little animation! We can animate this entire thing by simply changing a single value in the Noise Shader we loaded up into the Displacer. Go to your Displacer’s Shading tab, and in the Noise Shader, find the Animation Speed option. Right now it’s set to 0 which means no animation will be taking place. If you put another value in there other than 0, it’ll animate the noise. A small value of .2 creates a nice organic undulation that puts this all in motion nicely.
13 ADD More organic randomness
Now this is when we can start pushing this effect! The great thing about Voronoi Fracture is the ability for it to utilise the Mograph Effectors we all know and love. Select the Voronoi Fracture object and go to the Mograph dropdown and select a Random Effector. Change the default values of 50cm to 10cm in the Position XYZ. Check Scale and change the Scale value to .25 and check Uniform Scale. Next, we’ll turn on the Rotation and add a value of 10º in both the R. H and R. B.
14 use Effector FALLOFF
Our ribbons now look like a frazzled mess (which you may decide is a good look for your project), but here I think I want to constrain this randomness from the Random Effector to a certain part of the object. I’m going to utilise the effector’s Falloff to achieve this. In the Random Effectors Falloff tab, change the Falloff Shape from Infinite to Box and check on Invert. Now wherever your wireframe box is, that area won’t be affected by the Random Effector, and this allows us to art direct where the distortion is occurring in our ribbons. You can adjust the Falloff % as well as the rotation and size of the falloff Box shape to your liking.
15 create Materials For THE ribbons
This entire time we’ve been looking at colourised ribbon fragments in our viewport, which doesn’t allow us to be able to view any materials we apply to the Voronoi Fracture object. To disable this effect, go to the Voronoi Fracture object and in the Object tab, uncheck Colorize Fragments. Now you will be able to see the materials you apply in the viewport. For the first material, I will use a simple white material in the Color channel with a Beckmann reflection channel in the Reflectance Channel, and apply it to the Voronoi Fracture object. This turns all of our ribbons a nice reflective white.
16 Apply Material For inner ribbon
Now what if you wanted to apply a different texture to the inner part of the ribbon for more contrast? Well typically you could utilise the Selections feature of the Voronoi Fracture object (found in the Selections tab) but since we don’t have any thickness to our fragments, the Inside and Outside Faces won’t work. To apply a different colour to each side of our polygon, we’ll need to colour each normal, or side of our polygon. In the Color channel, click on the button with the white arrow to the right of the word Texture, and go to Effects>normal Direction.
With this shader loaded up, click on the Normal Direction button and you’ll be required to choose two colours, one for the outside normal (Color 1) and one for the inside normal (Color 2). Choose white for Color 1 and whatever colour you decide for Color 2 (I chose a nice hot pink). Now in your viewport you’ll see the outside faces of the ribbon are white and the inside is now whatever colour you chose.
17 iterate with other objects
The great thing about this setup is that it’s completely procedural, so you can easily swap out an object and apply this sliced ribbon setup and iterate pretty easily. For example, let’s take a few spheres and place them in a Null by selecting your Spheres and hitting Alt+g. Place your Null with the Spheres underneath the Voronoi Fracture but above the Displacer and Smoothing Deformers, and delete the other object you used previously. You’ll now see the fracturing and displacement effects are applied to these spheres.
18 work with sphere primitives
We now have an issue where our object is pretty chunky and rigid due to not having enough subdivisions in our geometry to smooth out the displacements. Select all of your spheres and in the Object tab, up the Segments to around 125.
Spheres are a special use case because of the different types of spheres that have their own subdivisions and polygon structures. Change the Type of sphere from Standard to something a bit more evenly subdivided, like an icosahedron or hexahedron. Be sure to adjust your Random Effector falloff, Displacer noise shader, and Smoothing Deformer to taste! •