A Brick Heart!

#1

Hi there, really stumped on something here. Put simply I am trying to build a heart out of bricks.

The bricks need to animate as if they are ‘building’ the heart, and I thought I could use the Cloner and apply the clones to the surface of the heart. The problem is I don’t have any control over where they appear, they all overlap (I tried the push apart deformer) and so it’s all quite random, plus it doesn’t show a build.

I looked into changing the cloner so it filled the volume, add some dynamics, but obviously they all

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Screenshot 2020-10-07 at 09.17.13.jpg1068x1434 476 KB
just collapse inside and are not uniform (as you would expect). I tried the Surface Deformer too but that doesn’t achieve what I need so wondering if I need x-particles or something? I have never used that before.

If anyone has any ideas to point me in the right direction I can try other methods!

#2

Have you tried a voronoi fracture to slice and dice the heart in small brick-like cubes?

Then with a simple plain effector + falloff you could control how the brick appear and build up.

#3

Hi Eric, I have not heard of this! I will check it out, thanks :slight_smile:

#4

Here’s a very crude example

Diceexample
Diceexample.jpg1661x993 607 KB

#5

Well I think you’ve cracked it! I will use Voronoi fracture! Amazing, thanks so much Eric

#6

Hmm, I can see that you can use different shapes in the Voronoi ‘Sources’ panel, but you have used a Cylinder here to create the brick shapes. I can’t replicate that so tried the cube but get similar results. The tutorial I just tried doesn’t explain the odd behaviour I am getting… Are you using another setting?

#7

I removed/unticked the cylinder cap to only cut stuff from the sides.

Also I used “hull only” and entered a thickness of the wall in the voronoi fracture.

#8

Awesome thanks, I was able to get a good effect using the ‘Matrix’ as Source too, thanks again for your help :grinning:

#9

Hi Eric, I wondered if you could help again with this Voronoi fracture? I have used the matrix as a cut for the heart, but it seems to break it into small pieces. I need to do it exactly as you have done using the cylinder, but even following your workflow I can’t seem to replicate. The idea is that the object to put in the sources panel sits beside the object you want to break up right? I can get the object to break apart in horizontal lines, but not into blocks.! I’ve tried different shapes but don’t seem to be able to get the same level of control you did… :persevere:

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#10

I didn’t do anything fancy. Here’s an example.
BrickHeartExample.c4d (568.4 KB)

The cylinder should be centered with the heart if you want to “project” the cuts from all angles, else if it’s outside you will only project cuts from this perspective, and get slices instead of “cubes”.