This plugin let’s you generate a rectangle, then subdivide it randomly and animate it procedurally with Composition Time. You can easily populate each cell with a video, still, shader or a colour. Use other Cavalry Behaviours to further change and influence the design, for example a Bevel Behaviour to round up each corner and more.

Make sure to follow Cavalry’s official Third Party Plugins Installation guide here.

Controllers are split into 4 groups:

• Overall Size and Depth of Subdivision
• Cell and Gutter Size
• Cell Split
• Animation

Each of these groups will influence how the subdivision behaves and looks like. For example, Minimum Cell Size will allow you to create smaller and smaller pieces. This will be limited by Max Number of Cells and Depth value. The idea is that you can easily set limits to prevent your scene crashing, or to speed up your scene while you working.

Without these limits, you could easily generate 1000+ pieces, which could slow down Cavalry scene to a crawl, or crash it.

To assign individual shaders to the design, best course of action is to use Contours to Sub-Meshes Behaviour as a Deformer. This Behaviour splits meshes into individual “pieces”, by using gaps between meshes. If there are no gaps (Gutter Size = 0), then you may end up with a weird, Tetris-like design. It looks cool as a stylistic choice, but is pretty hectic to look at, when you play back the animation.

To add Colours or Shaders, simply add Sub-Mesh AFTER using Contours to Sub-Meshes Behaviour. Then you can use Color Arrays, Gradients, Image Shaders and more.

Loop option works best if you are trying to loop your design over 200+ frames. Otherwise, it may not loop correctly and Cell Drift Speed won’t be as responsive. The reason for this is that Math behind the scenes is trying to use Modulo function to create a seamless loop. But if it has not enough frames, it may fail.

Failure tends to happen, because other controllers are influencing each other to generate Recursive Subdivision. Min Cell Size prevents too many cells to be generated, Depth allows for more sub-division, Max No of Cells is limiting design complexity and so on. All while the whole thing is animate – too much complexity + not enough frames and Loop may not work properly.