Then click on the "BrokenPieces" copy of our vase. Give it a moment to calculate, and you should see your once all yellow colored vase is now in many multi colored pieces. Now we can simply delete the blades by hitting the delete button on your keyboard. It will have turned your original vase copy into many editable meshes. I like to change to Edit Poly because it is just a bit of a better way to adjust the pieces and clean them up. Select all the pieces, right click to bring up the quad, and select Convert to Editable Poly again. You should notice that some of our pieces are a bit misshapen, this is due to 3DS Max trying to smooth things out automatically and may require us to go into each piece and edit the smoothing groups for a cleaner broken piece. Select one of your pieces, and turn on your Element sub-object selection mode. Then select the element in your broken piece of vase. Down in the Edit Poly settings, find the rollout menu for Polygon Smoothing groups, and then simply click on the Autosmooth button which should be defaulted to 45. Clicking on the Autosmooth button should redefine the smoothing group to a 45 degree angle for all the polygons and should do a pretty darn good job of getting rid of those unsightly edges and corners. Then just turn off your Element sub-object selection mode, and do this for each piece in your broken vase until it all looks smoother, just like the one piece we just did: I have taken the time to smooth out all my pieces (tedious but necessary for a good result in our animation) and now we can continue! It isn't perfect but for our purposes, it will do just fine and it does look 100% better than the original pieces.
Then click on the "BrokenPieces" copy of our vase. Give it a moment to calculate, and you should see your once all yellow colored vase is now in many multi colored pieces. Now we can simply delete the blades by hitting the delete button on your keyboard. It will have turned your original vase copy into many editable meshes. I like to change to Edit Poly because it is just a bit of a better way to adjust the pieces and clean them up. Select all the pieces, right click to bring up the quad, and select Convert to Editable Poly again. You should notice that some of our pieces are a bit misshapen, this is due to 3DS Max trying to smooth things out automatically and may require us to go into each piece and edit the smoothing groups for a cleaner broken piece. Select one of your pieces, and turn on your Element sub-object selection mode. Then select the element in your broken piece of vase. Down in the Edit Poly settings, find the rollout menu for Polygon Smoothing groups, and then simply click on the Autosmooth button which should be defaulted to 45. Clicking on the Autosmooth button should redefine the smoothing group to a 45 degree angle for all the polygons and should do a pretty darn good job of getting rid of those unsightly edges and corners. Then just turn off your Element sub-object selection mode, and do this for each piece in your broken vase until it all looks smoother, just like the one piece we just did: I have taken the time to smooth out all my pieces (tedious but necessary for a good result in our animation) and now we can continue! It isn't perfect but for our purposes, it will do just fine and it does look 100% better than the original pieces.
brokenvase.docx