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Voronoi Cage

16

Learn how to achieve this effect with this quick tutorial by Blender Sushi

Blender Sushi writes:

There is this particular "Voronoi" effect I have been wanting to do for years. I have tried to achieve this particular effect using other 3D packages like Maya and Houdini.

Houdini is definitely the perfect contender for this. It is all procedural, so you can pipe in all kind of mesh and it will spit out different result each time.

And surely one can do the same thing using Maya and SOuP plugins, but it is a little bit more tricky.

We can now do it inside Blender with such ease and really fast. For a quick job.

I don't know what to call it, but basically I want to have a "Cage" that is more or less based on Voronoi pattern. It is really simple actually. Just wireframe in 3D and with additional trickery to make it look interesting.

Link

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

16 Comments

  1. Hehe, is it just me or is there anyone else here who had no idea how to even start modeling this? o0. Good job man ;-)

      • Hey thanks I know I already checked ;-). Just when I saw the photo the first time, before going through the tut I thought I'd try and guess how it was done, just to see if i could nail it. But honestly I just didn't know how do even do this. Had to go through the tut to get a grasp of how it was done. Pretty amazing...it was ^^

        • The idea is really simple like Maciek said: just all bunch of "procedure" on to of each other and apply Skin Modifier.

          We know that Skin Modifier does branch meshing (even loops allowed!) based on inter-connected poly edges.

          All we need to do is then: feed in is some kind of interesting edges topology structure into Skin Modifier. The result is a single mesh and can be quite clean (no overlapping) depending on setup.

          In this case, what I did was piping the resulting edge structure that is created by using Cell Fracture add-on, right into Skin Modifier. To get really clean Voronoi structure, you have to get rid of other edges and just keep JUST the Voronoi Edges. The quick way to clean the structure is by using "Remove Doubles" on the joined mesh, but if applied too much, you only get Triangulation structure and lose the Voronoi structure.

  2. quick note:
    before you apply the skin modifier, make sure your object is scaled up quite a bit. My object encompassed the entire grid that shows in the default scene. If the object is not scaled up enough the skin mod ends up looking awful.

  3. IDK how you did it, but I would just use the fracture add-on and a boolean set to difference. (scale down each piece)

  4. The tutorial looks straight forward, yet awesome. (glad to see a written tutorial these days)
    My schedule for today now has "learn cell fracture" written all over it.
    Thanks for the inspiration and ease of something new! I would imagine other procedurals could be used as well...

    won't be long till I'm adding glass materials or trying to do microscopic cells, or making flat fill-in for stained glass I'm modeling.

  5. Nazzareno Giannelli on

    Thx to this news I found your blog Jimmy. I found so many interesting things there! Glad to have another great resource for Blender :) Keep on rolling like this man! :D

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