• 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

Effectors - Overview

Effectors are the objects in MoGraph that do the special effects. We will demonstrate each effector further on in the review to show what they do. Briefly, effectors take clones, matrix object nodes or Thinking Particles particles, regular objects or points or polygons on objects and change their position, scale, rotation or other effector specific property. e.g. sound effector uses sound files to animate objects.

They can be used in a number of ways:

1. With a cloner object selected and an effector is created, the effector is placed into the effector field on the cloner object. Multiple effectors can be in this field on the cloner object and the order is important as different results can be achieved by rearranging the order of effectors. Effectors can be manually dragged into the effector field on cloner objects and an effector can be applied to more than one cloner object.

There is no need for the effector to be in the same hierarchy as the cloner object to work.

2. As a child of an object. In this mode the effector behaves as a deformer and the settings on the deformer tab come into effect.

3. Similar to #2 except you place the effector under a parent object along with a number of objects. The objects on the same level as the effector or as children of any of the objects are then deformed.

4. Applied to a Matrix object. We will demonstrate the difference of applying an effector to a Matrix object compared to a similar looking structure later. With a Matrix object, effectors can be made to control Thinking Particles.

5. Applied to the effector field on MoGraph objects like the text object or instance object. We'll demonstrate later in the review.

Effects like making a row of cloned cubes assemble themselves on to a text spline or an object are done by animating the strength of the effector. On the cloner object there’s also a strength setting. The reason for having a strength setting on the cloner as well for the effector parameter is that effectors can be applied to multiple cloner objects. By animating the effector strengths you can morph from one effect to other or go the whole hog and combine all of the effects together. The variation in what you can do is almost endless.

On most effectors there are min and max settings. These let you define upper and lower limits for the effector.

There are so many settings for effectors that it's impossible to go into any detail. One thing that's worth discussing is the fall off tab and this is common to most effectors. By default the effector is applied with infinite fall off i.e. no fall off. However there are a number of fall off types and these determine which clones that the effector has influence over and this is important to gain the precise effect that you’re after. Cleverly, you can invert the falloff as well. The fall off is shown by a yellow bounding box as per the image below. You can resize the falloff by dragging on the interactive handles or numerically via the parameter manager.

Once you start using the various falloff types you can animate the effector moving over the clones (or alternatively, the clones moving through the falloff field) to create some wonderful visual effects and here's a few examples of falloff types.

The linear fall off type is interesting in the way that it is applied as the effector moves across the clones or object. It behaves differently going back across the clones in that the effect is like playing the animation backwards and this animation demonstrates what happens.

As a comparison here’s a similar animation using the sphere falloff type. It’s not uncommon to see text animations like this on television commercials.

Apart from moving, scaling and rotating clones and objects around, effectors can also change the colour of them as well. The deal as I understand it, is that when you apply an effector to a cloner object for example, the clones are internally given a gray scale colour. This isn’t visible unless you enable the various colour options. Of course gray is pretty boring so you can define colours for the effector that colour the clones using the internal gray colour to determine the visible colour. Various blend options allow you to blend the colour the effector is applying with any material that is applied to the clones. The internal colour can also be used by the likes of the multi-shader to determine what colour gets applied to which cloner.

This sounds a bit complex so let’s try and demonstrate this. In the following animation 2 identical cloner grid arrays of cubes are being made to pulsate by the formula effector. On one cloner grid a material has been applied that uses the multishader. The multishader has 3 colours defined, red, blue and green. How these 3 colours are applied to the clones is determined by the gray scale that the effector internally applies to the clones. On the second cloner grid I have made the gray scale visible but there is no material applied to the cloner object. In this case the darker the shade of gray the smaller the clone is. Back to the first cloner grid. If the clone is a dark shade of gray then green is applied to the clone, mid gray gets red and light shades get red. Simple eh!!

Really important, particularly when making things rotate with effectors is the transform space which really means the coordinate system used for the clones or objects. You can define whether the clones or objects rotate around their own internal axis called a "Node" or around the axis of the effector or the generating object e.g. a cloner or matrix object. When you start using multiple effectors this is important as having different axis centres brings different results.

Effectors as deformers

The primary function of effectors is to be applied to cloner objects or matrix objects in their effector field but they can also be applied as a deformer to an object and this is what the deformer tab in the parameters is for. Using an effector as a deformer is done by making the effector a child of the object or under a null object along with a range of objects that you want deformed. There's a number of modes to control how the effector deforms the object or objects and these are: Points, Polygons and Object. Object mode is where you have more than one object. Point and polygon modes are applied to the points and polygons of each object. The polygon mode is really designed for when you have run a disconnect command on the object. In this mode the polygons are then treated as seperate objects. Note that when you disconnect the polyons you can disconnect by polygon selection rather than disconnecting into single polygons. i.e. you don't have to have individual polygons. You can have groups of polygons.

Weight Transform

Sort of a variation on fall off types is weight transform. This is where one effector's weighting is used to drive how another effector effects the clones or matrix objects (including Thinking Particles). The effector doing the driving doesn't have to be applying any transformations to the clones but each clone is given a weighting in a similar manner to applying a vertex map. Not all effectors can generate weightings and those that can have their own unique way of generating the weigthing. To see the weighting you need to enable show weighting on the transform tab of either a cloner or matrix object. This all sounds more complex than it really is and once you've done it a couple of times the relevant section in the manual all makes sense whereas first time around it can be a little challenging to understand. In fact this is common across a lot of things in MoGraph and the documentation. Some of the concepts and techniques are hard to explain in writing and are best demonstrated visually and by having a go yourself.

Below is an example where a shader effector has a gradient loaded as the shader. The Shader effector is the first effector in the effector field on the cloner object and apart from generating the gradient weight map it has no other influence on the clones. Below the shader effector is a random effector. The random effector has position in the Y axis enabled only, along with effector colour with alpha. To use the weighting from the shader effector the weight on the fall off tab of the Random effector is set to 0. This makes the random effector use the weight map defined by the shader effector. Increasing the weight from 0 blends the normal random effectors influence with the weight map defined by the shader effector. And of course what's cool is you can use animated textures or shaders to generate the weight map as well if you use the Shader effector.

We wont go into but there's also options for U/V transform (nothing to do with texturing) and Modify clones. Yet more ways to control things.

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