A couple weeks ago I had a project (week #24) where I created patterns first in Illustrator and then did extrusions in Cinema 4D. While this was fun, there were a few limitations with the process.

 

First, it was pretty manual. I generated the pattern in Illustrator manually. To address that problem there are ways to actually generate a Voronoi pattern in a tool (e.g., in Photoshop), and then vectorize that pattern (that can be done in Illustrator, Photoshop or in Cinema 4D) .

 

That works, but it still does not solve the second and main challenge which is to have that interesting pattern along any geometry, not just 2D planes.

 

I did a lot of research on this and found that I was not the first one to ask, no surprisingly. The process I ended up following (see part 1 of this tutorial) involves MeshLab (a tool for manipulating and cleaning up 3D scans) and the ability to create polygon selections from the geometry painted on an object. 

 

While the techique works and I was able to generate a Voronoi mesh, I ran into problems with the geometry I was generating and reached out to the C4D cafe for help.

 

While I finally got a process to generate a Voronoi mesh around any shape (I was doing it around an egg shape), and I have learned a lot about geometry cleaning and normals in C4D and MeshLab. In particular, I have learned about the Phong Break Selection Tool which was the final answer I was looking for on C4D Cafe.

I had wanted to experiment with depth of field for a while and finally got around to do it for this week's project. It is fairly simple and subtle here, but you can see that only a small part of the Voronoid broken shell (the dark one) is actually sharp. This is because I have used a very short depth of field which gives this close up shot effect that I was going for.

 

In the close up below you can see how the background is a lot more blurry than the front which is in focus, giving the rendering a more photo-realistic look.

I have created pretty dark renderings in the past few weeks, so I also worked on a variation for this week, with an all white and bright composition!