This week, I have been trying to learn a bit more about manipulating and breaking shapes in Cinema 4D. So I have learned more about the Boole tool, the knife tool, the extrusion tool and the  etc... This is a first rendering, using a Boole to cut a piece out of one sphere with another one. 

 

When I started, I thought I'd do a single piece with multiple spheres in one rendering, but I ended up with a bunch of different renderings that I liked and thought I'd keep as is.

 

For the lighting, I have used the studio lights by Motion Squared thanks to the awesome Pinterest boards by Patricia Cormet (there are several Cinema 4D boards).

The first effect (above), is using the ExplosionFX effect, applies it to a sphere object (with enough segments, I use 100) and a icoseadron type. The ExplosionFX is set up as explained in this Greyscale Gorilla video: Time is set to 100%, the Blast Time to 0.001 and the Gravity is set to zero. Then I just used the selection tools to group the different pieces. I added an internal sphere with a matte texture to avoid having additional reflections.

This first images is really very simple. It uses the Boole tool to cut a piece out of a sphere, with another sphere. Nice thing about the Boole tool is that it preserves which surface came from which object, which makes it easy to texture the different pieces (here the black surface comes from the orginal sphere and the white from the sphere I used to cut the top out).

 

The only thing I wish was an option in the Boole tool was the ability to break down all the pieces, like the Illustrator pathfinder tool lets you do.

This is also very simple. From a simple sphere, I used the extrude tool to give it thickness. Then I used a simple cube to cut out the top with the Boole tool.

The following image was created with the ExplosionFX effect. It is out of fashion, from what I understood watching a Greyscale Gorilla tutorial. However, I find it really useful. In particular, I like the fact that it creates polygon selections for the meshes it creates when extruding shapes. You get a selection for the exterior, the interior and the edges of the extrusions, which is very useful. May be not obvious here, but I used a different texture for the edges of the broken pieces.

This is a variation on previous techniques. It uses two spheres: one inner and one outer. The outer one is modified with the extrude tool to have thickness. Then I learned to manipulate polygons to create a shape to cut the piece out of both spheres.

This ones is done with the Thrausi plug-in. Doing simple slices like here does not do justice to this plug-in that is quite powerful. I ran into this when trying to do a very different effect (I wanted to break an arbitrary shape into small cubes), but what can do more can do less, and it is a really nice and quick way to slice objects. There are other interesting plugins by the same author, on the Nitro4D site.

The following image is using the same technique for scooping out the small pieces off of the big (black sphere): I used a small sphere, replicated it on the surface of the target sphere (actually another sphere of the same size) with a cloner object (using the Object mode on the cloner, and then the vertex distribution so that spheres are replicated at each of the surface's mesh vertices) and then applied a Random effector to give each of the small spheres different sizes.

 

Once I had this, I used the Boole object to cut small pieces out of the main sphere. I used it twice, once to cut out (boolean type: A substrac B) and once to create the pieces that got cut out (boolean type: A intersects B).

 

Then, to get the pieces to scatter on the floor, I used dynamics. The trick here was to get the pieces to behave as objects. To do that, I had to first optimize the geometry created by the Boole tool. This is important, as this welds together the points that are at the same coordinates. Then, I converted the resulting shapes polygon groups to objects (this is in the mesh menu).

This one is really gratuitous, since I have just reused techniques used in the previous. But, I was enjoying doing this, so I kept going! Again the Boole tool to carve out the sphere (using multiple toruses).