• 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

Spline Wrap

Those familiar with the excellent Path Deformer plugin will find the Spline Wrap deformer performs similarly. i.e. an object is deformed around a spline. Path Deformer was one of my favourite plugins so I found using the Spline wrap deformer very easy. In fact Spline Wrap was easier to use than Path Deformer as you're able to define which axis of the object is aligned to the spline and some of the other settings are more intuitive. The Spline Wrap deformer also has the option to stretch the object to the length of the spline which is very useful plus a number of extra things as well. For those without MoGraph I still thoroughly recommend the Path Deformer Plugin

When the target spline used by the deformer contains more than 1 segment each segment receives its own copy of the object to be deformed. This allows for text animations where the text spline is made up of multiple segments. What's cool is animating the strength of the deformer and you'll see your original object morph on to the shape of the spline. You can then animate various parameters and have the object moving and growing around the spline.

The deformer has a number of function graphs and they behave similar to the function graphs on the enhanced Sweepnurbs object in 9.6 except there's a few more of them.

One thing to be aware of when using the spline wrap deformer and other MoGraph objects is that the sliders often go from 0% to 100% but the small spinner buttons let you have negative values or values over 100%. In the case of the offset parameter for example, if your spline is not closed then the object will shoot off the end at an angle that corresponds to the direction of a spline point tangent handle. This can be very useful at times and the Spline Wrap deformer allows you go either direction past the end of the spline.

Not only can parametric and objects made editable work with the Spline Wrap deformer so can splines as the Slinky animation below demonstrates. In making this animation I picked up a little bug. My original animation only had 1 Spline Wrap deformer and 4 splines. The 4 splines matched the 4 steps the Slinky takes. Step 1 the Spline Wrap deformer uses Spline 1, Step 2 it uses Spline 2 etc. In the viewport the animation played perfectly with the Slinky taking 4 steps and walking across the screen. However when I came to render the animation all that I got was the first step rendered out 4 times. For some reason the rendering process wasn't picking up the spline field of the deformer changing. I passed the scene file on to Maxon and they confirmed that there appeared to be an issue with this and would pass it on to the developers. They very kindly offered a work around which was to use 4 Spline Wrap deformers which is what you see below.   I'm happy to confirm that this bug has been addressed in release 10.

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