I would be curious to know what additional features it has, as is, RayFire is still the de-facto IMO especially for the great results, amount of features, price, and fine support.
It looks like a Voroni fracture algorithm. Wondering if it has any different options. Hard-coded and multi-threaded are a plus for sure.
Also wondering how nice it plays with Box#2 and TP. The later of course I am sure they have tested it with.
Anyone here beta tested it? Solitude?
Hope they have a demo at Sig…
it’s a pretty good one imho. I had to use it on the last project. there is some control over the shapes, but it will always be convex. so the result is always a voronoi style look. What you can do though, is scale the grid in world axes. and you have a falloff possibility where you make it start with big chucks and get to smaller ones over space.
I remember it created pretty clean meshes and was more or less stable. never tried the texture thing though.
if you play with it a little, you will start to understand how it works.
it basically creates closed elements within a polyMesh.
the way we used it was that we broke up irregular frags with a lot of detail with rayfires dragFrag mode. and then applyed a volumebreaker modifier on top of those. this gave the abilty in tp to simply frag off the new elements on collision and such.
Well I’m not really sure what I can say so I won’t say a lot 
It’s definitely very cool! One important thing to note is, that the workflow between volume breaker / tp and Rayfire is very different! VB/TP is more on the procedural side, while RF is more on the manual side. Both are good/not so good in specific situations. It’s like texturing, oddly enough, sometimes you need to place it procedurally, other times you need to paint something specific in. Might sound strange, but I think it’s a good analogy
cool looking plugin! I’m especially interested about it’s speed. Because I tried building a script based on Garp’s voronoi script, where it does tend to be very slow with larger numbers.
(I might also have to rename the script, currently the script’s name is “Volume Slicer” :argh: )
Yeah, it is super fast… texturing works ok… I can’t remember now how the uv’s were created, but even then I would usually just select those faces via the mat id, and apply my own anyway. I will def. say it’s nice to have it as a modifier so you can constantly make changes to it on the fly, but without TP that part of it is pretty pointless as you’ll need to break it up into separate objects for any other physics engine to use it anyway. One thing it does do is the odd-shaped meshes (ie a mesh with holes in it) very well. I think I can safely say that rayfire is still enough for 90% of the things you’ll need to break, but having another option is never a bad thing… and I’m not too sure about the price, considering the “non intro” price is 396… rayfire only being 285 with a very nice physx front-end (now if only nvidia would hurry up with 64bit!)
I just noticed they put up two demo videos… and If I remember correctly they’re showing the tp integration there… which is pretty cool stuff – you guys will have to wait and see!
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Matt was kind enough to give me a demo at Sig, it is really quite fast, I did not get to see any of the texturing features, just the slicing and interactivity, it is nice it is a modifier with a gizmo. TP procedural breaking should be cool
Looks like a nice addition to the toolbox, it certainly doesn’t appear to be robust enough that it will replace anything only compliment existing tools.
Hi guys
here’s a little testscene I did for the siggy CEBAS booth. nothing special.
http://www.ground-studios.de/michael/fragsWarp_01.mov
I fractured a cylinder with a cellularmap, to get some size variation in the fragments, deleted all the center fragments, kept only the outer rim, cloned 3 times, pathdeform, camera, light, voilá!
The concept of VB is a true 3D fragmentation of solid objects mainly via Voronoi algorithm. In the end you will get a bunch of thousands and thousands of elements fitting perfectly together.
You will not that easily create such cracks as you might have seen with rayfire, because rayfires fragmentation (from what I heard) is a scripted frontend to control the max’ Pro boolean. This is not bad, but not the concept of VB.
And yes there is no simulation feature in Volumebreaker. You’ll need TP, or Pflow.
cheers
Michael
It should work with Reactor as well.
"The output created by volumeBreaker is a standard 3ds Max mesh with properly defined mesh elements in it, any 3ds Max compatible Physics Engine or Particle system (built-in or 3rd party) may process the volume broken mesh and create amazing destruction animations. Further modification of the volume broken mesh with standard 3ds Max tools is possible as well."
Yes it will work with any physics engine (even with rayfire / physx), but you will need to turn it into separate objects first (not a big deal). It’s nice having it as a modifier… but even with that I ended up collapsing it most of the time.
As for this vs. rayfire, the voronoi fragmentation in rayfire does not use procutter afaik (but does for the other cutting methods), but does rely on standard max methods. Like I said before, rayfire is still more than enough for 90% of cases imho, and is quite capable of creating the same voronoi patterns. One cool thing about VB is the scaling features on the gizmo… pretty cool. The cebas vb is also very fast and clean, as they spent a lot of time under the hood making sure it works with those “special case” meshes.
So if you use TP and VB together, will TP brake the mesh procedurally on collision? is it fast with TP?
… in Tp3, you can take any mesh’s elements and break the elements off based on ‘rules’, but it’s typically controlled with lights (preferrably fr particle light). So collision occurs -> trigger light, any mesh elements within range of light get sent to a new group as a separate particle.
So if you have the volumebreaker modifier on an object, it is essentially making separate elements for the mesh, you then take that into tp as a whole, then break it apart into particles with the fragment operator, each element breaking off is a particle. It’d be as fast as using any other mesh-- the creation of the voronoi cells is the fast part… fast enough that you can generally keep it on the object as a modifier, only needing to collapse when you’re happy with the cells (fragments).
Dont forget about the standard particle flow ‘shape instance’, it has a checkbox where you can usea mesh’s elements as seperate particles aswell.
I am so confused about how to use this tool. I’m sure it has to do with me not messing with Max for the past 6 years. I’ve managed to do the slices just fine…but then what? How do I make the thing shatter?
I tried using pFlow…but I have no idea what I’m doing. Anyone want to link me or guide me to getting this solved?
If you are not using Box#2 in Pflow you would need to use a particle fragment birth script. Such as this one written by Bobo. You would then mesher the system and turn it into a reactor simulation for physics. (or something like that, you’ll have to do a search the for the process, it has been a dogs age since I have used it, there are many more straight forward approaches now, ie rayfire, pf tools box#2, thinking particles, to name a few)
Yeah I kinda need a way to do this with either pFlow or Thinking Particles. I’ve been searching for the better part of 8hrs for explanations or tutorials on how to do this, but everything is just “Oh do this and that and it’s done”. It seems to not be that easy though.
All I need to know is how to separate the elements once I’ve gotten done with shattering the object.
Everything else I can figure out from there.
All I need to know is how to separate the elements once I’ve gotten done with shattering the object.
Press the Elements to Nodes group box “Copy & Hide” button 
