MoGraph

It would appear that MAXON has been listening to user feedback and requests as there's been some useful enhancements to the MoGraph module.

Plain Effector

First up there's a new Plain effector. This is essentially a Shader effector but without the colour effects. Often with MoGraph you just wanted to control some clone objects by moving an effector near them and usually with some falloff defined. The standard practice was to use a Shader effector and disable the colour options. Now you just use a Plain effector.

Volume Effector

The Volume Effector is an entirely new effector. The influence on clones is determined by a source object. Any clone that lies inside the volume of the source object will be transformed in either position, scale or rotation or all 3. You can also transform the colour as well. In practice the Volume Effector behaves very similar to how using a source object to define falloff works but with the Volume Effector you can use uneditable primitives (but not splines under a extrudenurbs object for example). Falloff defined by a source object must use an editable polygonal object (or a spline primitive or editable spline). There are some subtle difference comparing a Volume Effector to using a source object to define falloff. The following 2 images demonstrate this.

Plain effector with editable torus defining falloff	Volume effector with torus primitive defining volume

It's obvious from the left hand image that the influence of the effector reduces the further away from a polygon that a clone lies whereas in the right hand image so long as the clone lies within the volume the falloff effect doesn't come into play. That said, with the Volume Effector it's still possible to define falloff using one of the various falloff modes or even using a source object but as mentioned you can only use editable polygonal objects.

The Volume Effector is easier to use and set up where you want to do scrolling text effects like the one below where some an editable extruded text spline is made to go through a field of cube clones. Previously to achieve the same result would have required an awful lot tweaking so that there we no holes within the text.

If you use the colour mode and only want the clones within the source volume object to be coloured then you'll need to enable the "Use Alpha / Strength" option. This had my scratching my head for a few moments. I note that there's no mention of this setting in the 10.5 documentation as far as I can tell.

Selections

Probably the best new enhancement for MoGraph is the ability create selection sets of your clones. A new MoGraph selection tool has been created that allows you to create selections. The tool works similar to the live selection tool and there's a range of modes. The selections are stored in a new MoGraph selection tag and these are dragged and dropped into a new selection field on effectors. This then allows you to restrict the influence of an effector to only the selected clones. Naturally you can have multiple Selection tags and the selection field on effectors can be animated.

Here's a simple animation with a cube in cloner grid. A formula effector is used and each horizontal row of cloned cubes is a selection. To spice things up I've also used a spline effector and a circle spline but with no selections. Also here's the object manager. I found working with MoGraph selections that it can easily get confusing with lots of tags so changing to a vertical tag format in the Object Manager allows the name for each selection tag to be displayed.

Object Manager with MoGraph Selection Tags	Cloner grid with Selection 1 (no effectors)

Sadly the thing that is lacking with MoGraph selections is the ability to apply textures to specific clones. This is regularly asked about in the forums here. I would hope that this comes in Release 11. This would make MoGraph even more powerful. Another thing I would like to see is the ability to hide selections just like how you do with points. This would make selecting nodes much easier and there's times where you just can't select the ones that you want without selecting others.

To go with MoGraph selections an XPresso Mograph Selection node has been created. This serves several purposes. Firstly it will tell you by index number whether a clone is part of a selection (clones each have a unique index number) and secondly you can dynamically add and remove clones from selections. The ability to dynamically add and remove clones from a selection is very powerful and for those people who know their XPresso some clever effects can be achieved. Here's a simple example where clones are dynamically added and removed from the selection. Here I'm adding to and removing from the selection tag on both sides at once.

There's one final addition to the MoGraph module. The Fix Texture parameter now has a number of options. There's 4 options: off, standard, Alternate X and Alternate Y. The idea with the Alternate X and Y modes is that you would have for example a cloner grid made up of planes. You have a logo or some image applied to the front and to the back. i.e. 2 texture tags. An effector makes the planes rotate 180 degrees and rather than logo being scrambled up, the alternate X or Y option will unscramble the image so that it displays and renders normally. Have to say I initially had trouble getting this to work but the MAXON programmer who looks after MoGraph came to my rescue. You have to apply the materials using cubic projections and pointing in the Z axis direction since the 2 options are to flip in the X or Y axis. Flat mapping won't work. I think the documentation needs more detail as I'm sure others will struggle as I did. Anyway here's the effect. To make it more obvious what the options do I've done one animation with the option set to Straight and the other to Alternate X. By the way you don't have to use the same image on both sides, you can use different images or textures.

So generally I'm pretty happy with these enhancements. The ability to define selections of clones is really great but would be even better if you could use the selection tag to apply materials to specific clones plus selecting clone nodes could do with a few more options to hide and unhide selected nodes like how you can do when point editing.