Voxel models are made up of lots of blocks. So it seems logical that there are scenarios where you’d want them to come apart, shatter, EXPLODE!
I thought there would be something inbuilt. or discussion on how to do this, but I can’t find anything. (well maybe a few things, but long before Craft existed).
So is there an easy way to blow up your model?!
@RaggedTooth - since you are posting a variety of Voxel queries could you put them all in one thread, otherwise we’ll rapidly fill the page with Voxel queries.
One of the mods can possibly move your existing queries into one.
Apologies, I didn’t appreciate the forum etiquette.
That’s about it on voxels for now…
The only way I know of to blow up a Voxel is to create the Voxel in various stages of explosion. Then you would have to display each one in sequence to simulate it blowing up. As far as I know, there’s no easy way to do it.
@RaggedTooth Using the Voxel editor, I was able to create a simple Voxel and then I created 2 more in increasing stages of explosion. It was just a square made of 4 cubes and the other voxels were the 4 cubes moving farther away from the center. I used the Voxel active command to make each successive Voxel active and the previous one inactive. It was only 3 different voxels, but it showed that it could be done. To make a better explosion will take a lot more editing and voxels.
@RaggedTooth - building an explosive Voxel could be quite expensive if you have a large number of fractions you need to make. The 36 vertices in a cube would increase to 288 in the 8 smaller cubes, if you broke each face into 4. A simpler, less expensive method ( if you built the model ) is to just use the triangles (faces) that constitute the model and add/multiply each vertex by the same factor so the faces effectively move away from each other. I think there is a very impressive example of a model explosion in the forum, I think from a sphere and , if I am not mistaken, made by @LoopSpace.
@RaggedTooth I think we’re talking about 2 different things. In the Voxel editor, a model is created using cubes. In the Froggy example, the cars are made up a bunch of different colored cubes. So to make the car explode, you would just take the different cubes that make up the car and draw another car where the cubes are farther apart. You would continue that moving the cubes farther apart in different images. You’re not exploding the cubes, just moving each of them apart.
If you want to make an explosion that looks like model pieces flying off as if it burst into shards, search for the thread where @dave1707 demonstrates turning a craft model into separate individual craft models and then making them fly outward like an explosion.
If you want to make an explosion that looks like a Voxel block is exploding into little cubes that fly outward, there’s a tricky way you could do it, using the Voxel editor.
The trick is scaling: you make the frames of the explosion in the editor, using its largest setting, and then to show the explosion you scale all the models down so that each of the cubes in the models looks like it’s a small part of the larger cube flying off.
The issue with making a voxel model explode, is that any shared block faces are culled for efficiency purposes. Would you could do is make one voxel model per block that will be in the final explosion and animate those separately, while hiding the original. This could be slow depending on the size of the original model. If you just have blank cubes (non-textured blocks) you could create an entity for each cube reusing the same model and just having a different material color for each one.
The other option is to do what @dave1707 said and create a flipbook style animation at various stages of the explosion, which would look pretty neat.