Athanasios Pozantzis shows how to recreate Jake Allen’s Houdini boolean tube, procedurally in Cinema 4D.

While watching a looping animation from Jake Allen, a Senior 3D Designer/Animator at sarofsky, the Nose Man, Athanasios Pozantzis pondered how the same system could work in Cinema 4D. Turns out that it totally can. The result is incredibly close and is 100% procedural, according to Pozantzis.

The boolean tube starts with a Sine Wave formula object, that does most of the heavy lifting for the animation. Then a simple sweep object takes care of attaching geometry to the animated curve. The slicing effect is thanks to the Cinema 4D Voronoi Fracture Object. Changing a few settings will conform the fracture to the right type of horizontal lines. There are a few more steps that include things like using a Matrix Object, Plain Effector along with some other tricks that Weill take the project the rest of the way.