Tutorial: Page (1) of 2 - 08/26/05

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Pseudo Cell Division 3D Simulating Mitosis in CINEMA 4D By Ko Maruyama There have been several commercials and motion graphics that depict imagery breaking apart into separate objects.   While this isn't a real representation of true biology, there are tricks in MAXON'S CINEMA 4D that will help you to split shapes to create new graphics.  While I explored the process in 2D, this will be a 3D animation.

Instead of a third party plugin, you can complete this animation with the tools found in CINEMA 4D's standard set.  Here are the few steps needed.

1. Create a sphere primitive and duplicate it.  Simply click on the primitives icon and select a sphere from the Standard tool bar.  To duplicate items in CINEMA 4D, hold down the CTRL key as you drag items in their respective manager windows.   To duplicate the sphere, click on the name of the item in the Objects Manager, hold down the CTRL key on the keyboard and drag to a separate location in the Objects Manager.



2. Create a Metaball object to contain the two spheres.






3. Make the spheres equal children of the Metaball object.  You'll notice that the resulting geometry is larger than the size of the two spheres that entered the metaball.  That is a property of the metaball and the objects within it.  (NOTE: If you use editable polygons inside a Metaball object rather than primitives, you will get a completely different result.)



4. The size of the metaball shape is based not only on the polygons underneath it, but also on its "Hull Value".

Changing the Hull Value to 200% will encompass the two elements and give them an appearance closer to their original size when the two spheres are together, but when they separate, this value should reduce to 100% to allow the spheres to recover their original sizes.



By default, the Editor's subdivision value is set to 40m.  We won't be working with too many polygons, so this can easily cut in half to more closely approximate what we'll get when we render.  Set the Editor's Subdivision value to 20m.

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