Logo Reveal - Character Animation Using MoGraph: Making the Carrots Disappear into the Ground

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  • Duration: 07:31
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In this Video we will make the carrots disappear into the ground to reveal the Cineversity logo, using a Shader Effector with a bitmap logo. I will also explain the significance of the Cloner's UV coordinate system and how it correlates to the Shader Effector.

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Transcript

- [Anthanasios Pozantzis] In this video, we will make the carrots disappear into the ground to reveal the Cineversity logo. So let me just fold these hierarchies so we see fewer things in our Object Manager. And the way we're going to do this is by using a Shader Effector. So select the Cloner, go to MoGraph, and add a Shader Effector. And you can see that they all become a bit thicker. Now, in the shader effector in the Parameters tab, I'm going to turn off the scale and go here and add some motion, because I want to move carrots down by a certain value depending on if they are within the logo or not. So let's load that logo. Let's select the Shading tab, and let's click here to load our Cineversity mask. Open. And you can see that nothing really happens. They just moved to their original position. And you will start wondering, "Shall I move it a bit more? Nothing happens here. What can be the problem?" Well, it's a very simple thing to solve. If you select the Cloner and go to the Transform tab, by default, the orientation is set in Z plus space. What does that mean? Well, let's create a plane that is Z plus. And you can see that this is the orientation we have here. But our cloner has an orientation of Y plus or Y minus. You can't really tell the difference, but it's of Y orientation. So if I delete the plane and tell the cloner to have some sort of Y orientation, what you will see is that the logo moves. Excellent. So, let me select the Cloner, let's go and add 15 here so we can see things better, and what you will observe is that our logo seems to be reversed. And the reason is that actually it's not plus Y, it's minus Y. It's a 50% chance you get it right. I always get it wrong. So, it's a good opportunity to learn this. So there you go. We have anything that resides within the white portion of our logo goes down. But actually, I want the opposite. I want everything that resides on the black portion, and that's not the only problem. The other problem is that we're having these carrots sort of in the middle of the top and the bottom value. And the reason is our graphic has anti-aliasing. An anti-aliasing means we have some gray scale values, which are neither black nor white, they're intermediate. And if a carrot, or carrots, seem to lie on one of those intermediate values, it will have an intermediate position. But it's very simple to fix. In the Shader, we click here and we add a filter shader, which is a sort of a color correction shader. Click on this, and what you will see, amongst other things, is the Enable Clipping. Let's click on this, and what we can do now is set the Low Clip and the High Clip. And what you can do, if you make the low clip larger than the high clip and have them very close, so low clip is going to be five and high clip is going to be 4, actually we're reversing it as well. And now we have the effect we want. Anything that resides outside the logo now goes down. So we're done with this, and we need to select the Shader Effector now, and go to the Falloff tab, and add a falloff, a linear one, which is the same as what we used for the squashing and stretching. Make this a 100%, and I'm going to right click here and reset this because we're going to need it in a bit. Now, let me just turn on off the visibility of this one so we can only see the falloff of this one. And look at what happens here. We have some sort of misalignment of the value being applied, and the limits of minimum and maximum falloff values. And the reason this happens is that if you look at the Cloner, in the Effector's tab, the shader lies underneath the random, the one that randomizes our weights. And we need to select the Shader Effector, and go to the Falloff, and just zero out the weighting here, so the weighting is handled by that random effector. And now, if I move it, you will see that we have a nice little motion like this. Excellent. And all I need to do is time this animation so that after they bounce, so somewhere around here, the shader effector starts moving. So, let me add a key frame here, and then let's go and go somewhere around here, and then move this over here. Good. And add another key frame over here, and then right click so I'll linearize the speed, the motion. Click here, press Cmd+A or Ctrl+A to select all the key frames, make it linear, close this, and now we have this double animation. First, squash, stretch, and jump, and then the second one when they start moving downwards. And if I want to control the timing of the motion, I can do it, first of all, by making my falloff smaller if I wanted to go faster. The smaller the falloff, the faster the transition is going to be. And, of course, I can go and click here, press Cmd+A to select everything, right click, set this to Easy Ease, and then I can play around with these values, and adjust the speed of my diving animation. And because I want to see it a bit clearer, I'm going to add a plane to cover the ones on the bottom. And now I can see that I'm having all the squashing, and the stretching, and then I'm getting my carrots to dive into the ground, although you can see, in this case, it dives into the ground before it resumes its original position. So, in order to fix this, I need to make sure that my shader effector moves ever so slightly slower. And with a Shader Effector selected, I can go down here, and move this little blue key frame, and move it 10 frames later. And now, it's just going to delay a bit and there you have it. We have a nice animation of all my carrots squashing, stretching, jumping, going back to the ground, and squashing and normalizing their position. And then my shader effector moves through, and makes all my carrots disappear wherever they're outside the logo, and they reveal the logo in this way. The last thing I want to do, because I find that all my carrots are extremely well aligned, and I want to break up this uniformity. Just select your Cloner, and go to the MoGraph, and add a random effector. And in the parameters, just add a very small value of two in each and every one of the positional coordinates, and then go to the Rotation and add something like 30 degrees or something just to rotate the leaves ever so slightly. And this will give your animation a slightly more natural look.
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