From the course: Motion Graphics

3D topographic maps in Cinema 4D

From the course: Motion Graphics

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3D topographic maps in Cinema 4D

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- Welcome to another Motion Graphics Weekly where you up your Mograph knowledge one week at a time. I'm EJ Hassenfratz, let's get our learn on. There are a ton of new features added to Cinema 4D lately that make creating complex-looking objects super simple and easy. In this video I wanna show you how you can utilize the powerful Voronoi Fracture object to create an easy 3D topographical map just like this. So this whole set up is gonna be unbelievably easy to do. All we're gonna do is go and grab a landscape object here. And you can adjust this to taste. You can play around with the seed to get a nice looking little landscape going. And then what we're gonna do is fracture this up using the Voronoi Fracture object. So I'm gonna grab that and make the landscape a child of that fracture so it can be fractured up. Now this is going to be by default a fractured pattern based on the default Voronoi point generator here. So we just have all of these Voronoi cells and we don't want to have this default look. We actually wanna slice this kind of horizontally. So I'm gonna delete this default point generator source, and I'm gonna create a new one based off of a matrix object. Now basically with a matrix object each of these matrices could be an individual cut. So I'm just gonna make a linear cut and basically put this at the bottom of the landscape object and add a few more matrices, adjust the spacing in the y here. So just like that. And then I can use this as the fracture source. So I'll drag and drop the matrix objects into the Voronoi Fracture source field. And you can see now we have all of these nice rainbow pattern of horizontal slices that look really, really nice. And right now we don't have a whole lot to look at because it's not actually fracturing anything. It's just kind of coloring this differently. And we can actually uncheck the colorized fragments that just have the underlying texture show through. But you're gonna see that nothing changed. We have no actual fracturing going on that you can see visibly. So what we're gonna do is go ahead and adjust this offset fragment and what this is going to allow us to do is have nice little gaps between each of these slices. And so we can even go into our matrix object and just where the spacing is here, so maybe something like that, we can even add to the count and adjust the y spacing here to have even more cuts, okay? So a lot of flexibility here. I think that's looking pretty good. Maybe go back into our Voronoi Fracture, bring down the offset fragments down to maybe two centimeters. And you're gonna see that we can actually see through the fragments or the fracturing, almost like this is a ribbon. But what we wanna do is actually fill in those holes. So we're gonna select this optimize and close holes. And now you can see that those holes are now filled in. Now something that's really cool is we can apply a texture to this Voronoi Fracture and actually define a texture for the inside of those cuts into the little inner parts of our Voronoi Fracture. So we can do that by actually choosing an inside faces and when I click on that, that'll actually bring up the polygon selection tag for those inside faces. So if I wanna say apply a purple material to that inner selection I can drag and drop this into the selection and there you go you can see that the interfaces will now be purple. So one nice finishing touch I like to do is add a smooth deformer onto the landscape just to smooth everything out. And you can see that it looks a little bit more stylized, little bit more sleek, and you can adjust the stiffness overall of the smoothing deformer to either smooth it out or just kind of leave it as is. So the great thing about this workflow is it's parametric, it's live, we can go into this landscape object, adjust the seed, and the cuts will still remain. So we can really iterate quickly based on whatever seed you have and whatever object you have fractured. So maybe I delete the landscape. Maybe we have a torus in here that we're going to slice up and maybe just rotate this, make it a little bit bigger, and now we have a sliced up torus, and we can even adjust the angle of the matrix object as well to get some really interesting looking shapes and fractures going on. So have fun experimenting with all of the interesting things you can do using the Voronoi Fracture and a simple matrix object. Don't wanna wait until next week to learn something new? No problem. Here are other ways to feed your creative brain to keep you buys in the meantime. You can check out my other courses in the library, visit my website eyedesyn.com for more tutorials, subscribe to my YouTube channel to be alerted when I post a new video, join my Facebook page for daily Mograph inspiration, and keep up to date on all my latest Mograph creations on Instagram. Thanks for watching and I'll see you here again next week.

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