Using the Inheritance Effector: Playful Titles - Animating the title with the Effector

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  • Duration: 07:18
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  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

See how to transfer the keyframe animation from the previously animated cube to a title, using the inheritance effector.

In this video, we will see how we can transfer the keyframe animation from the previously animated cube to a title, using the inheritance effector. Also, I'll show you how to retime the animation and take control of the keyframe values without changing the keyframes themselves.

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Transcript

Now that we have our fantastic cube jumping, dancing, enjoy. First of all, I need to get rid of the padlock just so I don't forget that. Excellent. So, how do we transfer the animation? Well, let's go and create a MoGraph object, and the best one to use is the MoText. And what I'm going to do is type something like, "Time to play." And let's find an interesting typeface. So, what can we use here? Something like Poplar, yeah, I love this. Excellent. Now, I'm going to move this guy to the left, but in order to do that successfully, first, I need to put it under a null object because all keyframe animation is relative, it's object coordinates. So, now that it's under a parent, I can move it here, and it will retain its animation without any problem. Excellent. And, of course, I can use this to hide it and whatnot. Anyway, I'll leave it as it is for now. With the MoText object selected, I'm going to go and create an inheritance effector. The inheritance effector, in the effector tab, has the inheritance mode, and the object in question. In the object, I need to drop the animated object. And what you will see here is that the whole object just assumes a position of the animated object and does whatever it wants to do. This is not exactly what we want do. I want to inherit the animation. Now you can see that we have a discrepancy in the timing between the original cube and the text over here. And the reason is that it takes its values from here. So, what it's going to do, it's going to take the 18 frames of animation of the cube and spread it across 90 frames from 0 to 90. So, if I make this 18, now you will see that we have exactly the same timing. Now, I don't want to do this. I can always change the transformed space to generate it because now it's transforming based on where my MoText is sitting. So, what I need to do is maybe change it to node. So, now you can see that each letter jumps by itself, but still, they're all synchronized. The mode we need to change it to is falloff-based. So, I'm going to stop this animation and rewind, set it to falloff-based, and you can see everything else disappears. And what I'm going to do is tell the effector to have a falloff because it's falloff-based. I'm going to set this to linear, set the direction to +x, not to +z, and let's set this to 100%. Let's see what happens now. When I select the inheritance and move it through my text, what will happen is that any of the letters, because if you select the MoText, you will see that the effector has been applied to the letters by default. So, each and every one of these letters assumes the first frame of the animation when the yellow part comes in, and the last frame of the animation when the red goes out. So, throughout the duration or the size of the effector, the animation is propagated to each and every one of these objects. Let me undo a couple of times to get it back to its normal size. So, what I can do now is the following. First of all, I'd like to select my MoText, and just center it, excellent. I'm going to move my null a bit this way and I can always turn it off. That's fine with me. Select the inheritance affecter and put it over here, go to the coordinates, add a keyframe. Let's go to 90 frames. Go to frame 90, and move this to the side, add a keyframe, rewind and press play, and now you can see that my text is being animated by my effector. Anything we change in the animated cube is going propagate properly. So, for example, if, let's assume, I go here and I don't want it to jump that high or I want it to jump higher. I'm going to make this 600, press enter, add a keyframe, now you will see that text jumps even higher. And this is how it works. Let me show you a couple more things that are quite interesting. How you can control this animation without changing the keyframes of the animated objects. Number one, if you want to add some sort of extra bounciness to this, without having to add any more keyframes, what you can do is go to your MoText and your letters and you can add a delay affect. Let's make sure it's added here, excellent. You can see now that the delay effector is in blend mode, I want to put it in spring mode. And you can see, now we have this added springiness, and we can control how much of it gets propagated. So, that's all nice and cool. But how can I control, in an easier way, the magnitude of the values I've used? Because now I've realized that 600 is a bit too much. But I don't want to touch the animated cube. So, let me show you how to do that. Let's go to the MoText, and get rid of the inheritance effector and let it run. I mean, maybe I should stop it so you can concentrate. Then I'm going to add the new R18 re-effector. If you don't have R18, then just go and get it. So, the MoText has a re-effector applied to it. I'm going to put it above the delay so the delay comes after, and in the re-effector, I want to apply my inheritance. So, at this point, it's going to be exactly the same, nothing has changed. All we are doing, we are piping the inheritance affect through the re-effector, and applying it from the re-effector on the MoText. But the re-effector allows us to control each and every one of the parameters and even more. And each and every one of the axes of the parameters. So, what I can do is go to my position and say, "I don't want it to jump," or, "I want it to jump lower." So, now we have a procedural way of controlling how much of the animation comes, and do it by channels. Maybe I want it to scale a bit less and so forth. So, you have the ability to control and fine-tune your animation and add your extra little bounciness, and using these extra functions to create a really interesting and playful title animation.
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