• 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

Sound effector

As the name suggests, the Sound effector transforms clones and objects by using imported sound files. (Check out the the very cool Disco light animation later on in the review). The effector can load either wav or aif files. If the file is stereo then you can choose which channel to use. There's a number of options to filter the sound or reduce noise etc. One option is to restrict the effector to using only certain frequencies.

The filter spline graph allows you also define which frequencies the effector uses or to emphasise particular frequency ranges. This is quite important as often lower frequencies will be dominant and the transformation will be too extreme in these ranges.

The sound effector analizes the frequencies of the sound file and divides this up. e.g. a sound file with just low pitch notes applied to a linear array of cubes will have just the cubes towards one end being transformed. Like other effectors the sound effector can change the colour of objects and this is set up by a frequency gradient. Almost identical to using a gradient shader on a material. You can see the frequency graph for the wave file but note that it gives you a snapshot of the frequency graph that matches the frame number and where you are through playing the sound file. If you want to see the frequency graph change as you scrub through frames or play the animation then you need to enable the "Real time manager update (During animation)" option in the preferences.

One thing that I think is an oversight is you can't render out the sound file loaded into a sound effector. Using the 2D or 3D sound rendering commands from the timeline produces silent sound files. The workaround is to load the sound files into loud speaker objects and then use the built in sound rendering. Another annomaly is the "Play sound during animation" option has no effect whether it's enabled or not (no change in release 10) however it is possible to disable the sound by disabling the "Scrub Sound" option on the effector.

Animations can also be driven via XPresso using the sound node and this is how the disco light animation tutorial that comes with MoGraph works. The advantage here is that you can use the data to drive anything not just transforming and colouring objects.

Here's a simple animation to show how the sound effector can be applied to cloned objects. To get the cubes scaling correctly I moved the axis from the centre to the bottom of the cube. Otherwise the cube would scale in both negative and positive Y axis directions. To make the cubes all scale according to the frequency the step option is used. Personally I think that this should be the default setting as the "all" option makes the clones as a whole transform. To bend the scaled cubes I used a bend deformer. A delay effector is is used to soften the rapid changes of the scale of the cubes. The dust effect is animated noise on a light. Make sure to check out the Disco Lights animation further on in the review.

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