• Introduction
• Cloner object
• Effectors - Overview
• Group effector
• Delay effector
• Formula effector
• Inheritance effector
• Random effector
• Shader effector
• Sound effector
• Spline effector
• Step effector
• Target effector
• Time effector
• Linear Clone Tool, Radial Clone Tool & Grid Clone Tool
• Matrix object
• Fracture object
• Instance object
• Text object
• Tracer
• Spline mask
• Displace Deformer
• Extrude deformer
• Spline wrap
• Cache tag / Baking animations
• MoGraph shaders
• Manual and Tutorials
• Goodies / Samples Scenes Etc
• XPresso for MoGraph
• Release 10 and MoGraph
• Conclusion

Displace Deformer

The displace deformer allows you to see a materials displacement channel live in the viewport without having to render the object with the material applied. Not having to render the object or scene is a huge workflow enhancement and allows for a lot more adjustment to get just what you want. It should be noted that that only regular displacement can be previewed, not Sub Polygon Displacement where the object is sub-divided internally by CINEMA 4D prior to being rendered. Despite this caveat it is still very useful and even animated displacement channels can be previewed live in the viewport. This deformer is similar in functionality to the “displayVIEW” object from Jenna that is now no longer available. But the MAXON Displace Deformer goes beyond the Jenna displayVIEW object in a number of areas. One being that you can deform splines. The displacement deformer is more flexible when it comes to using textures for deforming than the Jenna equivalent as well.

The deformer works like any other deformer in that it has to be a child of the object to be deformed or in the same hierarchy, typically under a null object. Getting displacement on your object can be achieved a number of ways:

1. Your object has a material applied with a displacement channel. To work in this mode you enable the "Emulation" mode on the deformer.

2. Alternatively the deformer has its own shading tab (when emulation mode is disabled) where you load in your own displacement material settings, usually with the "Custom Shader" option.

On option 2 above you can drag and drop in a texture tag from any object. You then select the channel that you want from that texture tag to be used for the displacement. e.g. create a new material with fire in the colour channel. Apply this to a plane object. Create a displace deformer as a child of the plane object. In the texture tag field, drag and drop the material texture into it. Select the colour channel from the list of channels. The plane as well as being coloured with the fire shader is now deformed by the fire and you can press play and watch it deform (new in 9.6 is the ability to get animated texture preview from the illumination tab. Enabling this also displays the animated colour channel in the viewport)

In addition to viewing displacment mapping live in the viewport, the displace deformer can animate displacement on a per axis basis without the need for a material with a displacment map. In the following example 3 displacement deformers are applied to an extruded text spline. The strength parameter defines the amount of distortion.

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