Cebas VolumeBreaker

#10

Well then youā€™re in for a treat :smiley:

#11

Yeah, it is super fastā€¦ texturing works okā€¦ I canā€™t remember now how the uvā€™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 itā€™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 youā€™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 youā€™ll need to break, but having another option is never a bad thingā€¦ and Iā€™m not too sure about the price, considering the ā€œnon introā€ price is 396ā€¦ 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 videosā€¦ and If I remember correctly theyā€™re showing the tp integration thereā€¦ which is pretty cool stuff ā€“ you guys will have to wait and see!
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#12

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 :slight_smile:

Looks like a nice addition to the toolbox, it certainly doesnā€™t appear to be robust enough that it will replace anything only compliment existing tools.

#13

wow this looks sweetā€¦hope to tryout one day:buttrock:

#14

Hi guys
hereā€™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, voilĆ”!

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 maxā€™ Pro boolean. This is not bad, but not the concept of VB.

And yes there is no simulation feature in Volumebreaker. Youā€™ll need TP, or Pflow.

cheers
Michael

#15

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."

#16

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). Itā€™s nice having it as a modifierā€¦ 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 gizmoā€¦ 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 ā€œspecial caseā€ meshes.

#17

So if you use TP and VB together, will TP brake the mesh procedurally on collision? is it fast with TP?

#18

ā€¦ in Tp3, you can take any meshā€™s elements and break the elements off based on ā€˜rulesā€™, but itā€™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. Itā€™d be as fast as using any other mesh-- the creation of the voronoi cells is the fast partā€¦ fast enough that you can generally keep it on the object as a modifier, only needing to collapse when youā€™re happy with the cells (fragments).

#19

Dont forget about the standard particle flow ā€˜shape instanceā€™, it has a checkbox where you can usea meshā€™s elements as seperate particles aswell.

#20

I am so confused about how to use this tool. Iā€™m sure it has to do with me not messing with Max for the past 6 years. Iā€™ve managed to do the slices just fineā€¦but then what? How do I make the thing shatter?

I tried using pFlowā€¦but I have no idea what Iā€™m doing. Anyone want to link me or guide me to getting this solved?

#21

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, youā€™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)

#22

Yeah I kinda need a way to do this with either pFlow or Thinking Particles. Iā€™ve been searching for the better part of 8hrs for explanations or tutorials on how to do this, but everything is just ā€œOh do this and that and itā€™s doneā€. It seems to not be that easy though.

All I need to know is how to separate the elements once Iā€™ve gotten done with shattering the object.

Everything else I can figure out from there.

#23

All I need to know is how to separate the elements once Iā€™ve gotten done with shattering the object.

Press the Elements to Nodes group box ā€œCopy & Hideā€ button :wink:

#24

what on earth are you talking about?

#25

lol, did i misunderstand something? i was under the impression that he wanted seperate odjects after he had finalized his fragmentation.

what did you think i was talking about? :slight_smile:

#26

OMG I love you and thank you! Never even saw that group box. Man I need to come back to Max more lol.

#27

some one know how to apply texture in the inside of broken elements ?

#28

The interior faces are given the material ID that is set in the options group.

#29

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