How can I break Cube into individual objects?

[John Hammond]

If you make a cube, make it editable, and then go to Structure, Break Apart, it should make 6 seperate planes.
Or something like that, I’m new to c4d and not at my machine this weekend. Hopefully someone with a bit more experience in c4d will confirm this….

[John Doey]

Hey, I check for that and there is no option for that under Structure.
And to be quite honest I don’t think there is such a thing. At least
in C4D R11. hmmm….

OBTW.. I don’t want it to break into planes… I want it to break
into seperate objects.. 🙂

[Brian Jones]

a cube only has six faces, it’s hollow (move the camera inside one take a look), so it can only be broken up into it’s faces. You are going to have to make the smaller cubes you want to animate and put them in a cubic arrangement so they start as a cube then you can animate them. MoGraph or the Duplicate tool or by hand…

[John Doey]

Thanks for your replies.. I know that I can make smaller cubes and
then animate them to form a large one. But, this is a test for
the final result of text breaking apart. And I’m not planning to
make hundreds of tiny cubes to form the text.

I have done this with Mograph… But the end result was way too clean.
Plus I really want to know if it is possible…

Here is a pic of what I want accomplished.. This has to be possible.
I know there must be a way.. If not in C4d then maybe with a plugin
or through another 3d program.

breakapartcube.jpg

[Brian Jones]

How do you want to animate the chunks after they have broken (where do they go, what do they do?) Mograph is likely the most control but If MoGraph is too clean (?) for you, maybe Thinking Particles PFrag or PBlurp depending on what the animation is supposed to be like.

[John Doey]

Thanks once again for your reply….

Put it this way… Forget the animation… Is it possible to split
the segmented cube into it’s pieces, like the image I have above
through some sort of automation.

[Brian Jones]

Not that I know of. There is/was a plugin that used a spline for a knife which gave two parts of an object instead of just new edges in the object but that was one spline and to get what you want you have to do it many many times. Explosion/Shatter both use polys with no thickness, Explosion FX can do thickness but toward the center of the object so you get wedges. Doesn’t mean is doesn’t exist but I haven’t seen it myself.

[John Doey]

Awwww man… that just sucks… 🙁
Once again my creativity is blocked by technology.. 🙁

Vision put on hold…. dang..

Guess I will have to figure out another way.
Thanks anyways…

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You can break any object into individual faces by selection all of them, running Functions>Dissolve (uncheck preserve groups), and then by running Functions>Explode Segments. Of course that won’t give you *exactly* what you’re looking for.

I did this tutorial recently which might give you some clues:

https://www.3danvil.com/tutorials/folding%20sphere/Folding%20Sphere.html

I don’t understand the comment that MoGraph was “too clean”. You can stack as many effectors as you want (Random Effector comes to mind) to break up the regularity.

[Alejandro Torres]

Hi,

I think I know what you are aiming for, I really don’t know an easy way for doing this, but I’ll tell you how I did it for an animation. You can find the video segment in my demo reel 07 @ https://www.fxtudio.com/reel07.html The animation is the one that has kind of a teddy bear logo with the words “BIMBO”

I took my object, in this case the extruded logo. I made it editable and made some knife cuts in the desired pieces, most of them cubes or tetris like. then came the tedious part of selecting the two corresponding faces (front and back), then Choose “disconnect” from the functions menu and then “split” from the same menu. This leaves you with your original object and a new polygon object which consisted of the two faces. Then using stitch and sew, bridge tool, create polygon tool, close polygon tool or your method of choice I proceeded to link the two faces, there fore creating individual objects. Now repeat that process for every object. Believe me it is time consuming and repetitive. After that you finish with lots of individual objects that can be animated and are able to do what you please.

I hope this is useful, this is the approach I took and maybe it’s not the best one but it works, other than that maybe TP but not sure…

Regards,

Alejandro

Free C4D tutorials and objects: http://www.archc4d.com/freebies.html