[Brian Jones]

put a Compositing Tag on your GI source and uncheck Seen By Camera (and anything else appropriate) leave Seen by GI, of course 🙂

[Brian Jones]

put a Memory Node in between the passed values. The help has a good description of the History Depth and History Level settings in the Memory node – they’re what’s important to get what you need.

[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.

[Brian Jones]

it could be done with an animated gradient layer mask in the color channel (ok if your two materials are identical except for color) or stack two materials and animate the alpha channel in the top (right-most) one if the materials are significantly different. Quick examples these are not the only way to do it, Proximal (in Effects) would be another probably there are many more.

[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.

[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…

[Brian Jones]

you can either use a Display Tag and check off Use Visibility and animate the visibility parameter or animate the transparency or alpha channel in your objects material

[Brian Jones]

use the Animation Tool

[Brian Jones]

either
– right-click on the imported DXF in the Object Manager (if you don’t know which part of the interface that is you’re going to have to check the Help) and choose Cinema 4D Tags/Phong from the contextual menu that pops up

or
– with your DXF selected in the Object Manager go to the Tag menu in the Object Manager and choose Cinema 4D Tags/Phong from there.

[Brian Jones]

add a Phong tag to your objects