• 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

Inheritance effector

The name "Inheritance" makes this effector sound a little scary or complex. However like most things in MoGraph, once you've used it a few times it's quite straight forward. What this effector does is copy animation from a reference object and apply it on to clones or matrix objects / particles. The fun starts once you change from the direct mode to the animation mode. The direct mode essentially makes the clones / matrix objects transform as a whole. Once you have changed to animation mode you get a range of options like looping and stepping. Let's explain. You need an animated reference object. We'll use a cube. Animate the cube over 30 frames, moving, scaling and rotating. On the Inheritance effector enable animation mode. You can now enable looping and the clones or matrix objects will copy the cube's animation but keep on looping over 30 frames. For best results you need to make your cube's animation start and finish in the same place. The step option makes the objects start transforming seperately and you can play around with the amount.

There's a few simple options that make the cloner or matrix object centred on the reference object or you can have things relative where the cloner or matrix stays put and the clones etc move around from where they are. One really important option is the transform space. There's 2 options and they make a huge difference particularly when inheriting rotation. If the transform space is set to node then clones / matrix objects rotate about there own internal axis. However with the default generator transform space, they rotate about the axis of the effector.

One thing that I found very handy in release 10 was being able to disable various animation tracks on the reference object and see the effect that this had.

Here's a little animation demonstrating the Inheritance Effector. In this animation the reference object is a cube that goes up and down in the Y axis and rotates 360 degrees. I've used the effector as the transform space. This makes each tile rotate around the axis for the effector rather than itself. This produces a charming effect of the tiles flying around and reassembling themselves. The tile colours are done with the shader effector using a gradient with 5 colours but without knots.

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