3DS MAX Reactor Question - Fracture for Building Collapse?

Here is a demonstration of Fracture from discreet's site for R6.

I have a grasp on the basics of reactor, but what is the best way to cut up the ice cube into pieces so I can get the breaking effect? Is there a way to do it without spending hours cloning, selecting vertices, and doing numerous boolean operations?

 

yes there is, but only with some plugin, max can't generate volume I think (maybe I'm wrong). You can still cut a mesh very easy with slicing planes and cut, form edit poly, but it will only make surfaces. I know there some plugins like Cebas' scalpel but, you know, we are honest guys who don't download warrez, and cebas plugins are expensive...
And this scalpel stuff will only make some very sharp cut, no noisy stuff, but it can help however.

 

do what Jones said as far as slicing... then close those open polys with create poly in the editable poly menu... select just the polys you create and apply a Tesselate modifier to them which will create iterations... then collapse down to poly again, select those new iterations only and apply a noise modifier to them... that'll give you that rough fracture look you would get from concrete breaking apart...

it's a painstaking tedious process, but you'll get some nice looking fractures... unfornately as the polys mount, your system is gonna get slower and slower...

Darksteps...

 

I've been using 3ds Max 4 and 5 for about a year and a half now and I hope to god that I haven't been so dumb as to not ever find the Reactor Real-Time Preview! Please tell me thats a new feature in 3dsmax 6?

*EDIT* wow you learn something new everyday I guess, but today I feel like a complete idiot....

 

I'm sorry to hear that, Shadows_545. Yes it's in version 5.

 

Anyone have any other [free] suggestions?

 

Well I've been messing with it for a few days now and I'm just as lost as you are now. After searching and "fiddlin" I guess 3dmax can't make volumes, like Dr. Jones said, which sucks.

So Dr. Jones in the video you think they used a plugin, right? Thats most likely right, but doesn't anyone else think it's kind of dumb to show us something like that in a reactor demostration video, when they had to go outside of reactor/3dmax to achieve the effect?

 

Ah, but discreet has done that type of thing many, many times... it is practically an autodesk trademark.

 

No I didn't say it was done with a plugin, I said a plugin could help you to do this. Don't know how it was done. Looking at it, I would say they just made it by hand.

Yeah being a CG artist can also be boring sometimes

 

It just seems odd to me that something that would take hours to accomplish, like creating those cracks and making sure they would all align, would be considered so inconsequntial.

It also seems like the concept of creating those cracks would go hand in hand with fracture, and yet I can find no guides anywhere.