Cineversity

Hey folks - I’m trying to use a luminance map of the world to effect a cloner filled with cubes. I want to use the topographical info from the world map to make the cubes represent that topography. I’ve watched every EJ, Cineversity and Greyscale Gorilla tut I can find that’s close, but it still doesn’t work. The JPEG image I’m using for the luminance map is 3840X2160. Do I need to match up the size of the cloner to get close to those dimensions? Shouldn’t I be able to use a Shader Field on a Plain Effector to make this work? Any idea what I’m doing wrong?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Hi bronson_at_dnbstudios_dot_com,

To expose your email so publicly might be a dangerous idea. I would encourage you to create a username.

You have maybe a very clear idea about how this should look like, but the “Cloner filled with Cubes” doesn’t give me anything. The cubes should only appear where no water is, or should they just take a brighter color. Perhaps, the cubes have to move up to recreate the elevation map?

Here is an example, and please tell me what works and what doesn’t:
Scene file
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/zcZFoXLHtpFji20QG4gs5zEO2v6uDJHq4GCDjT9o5Pw

If you have a sketch or anything that could provide a visual clue, I would love to see it.

Cheers

Thanks Dr. Sassi. I really appreciate you taking the time to create an example.

What you’ve created is very close to what I’m trying to do. However, I’m trying to make those cubes “recreate the elevation map”, as you suggested. I was calling the “elevation map” “topographical.”
Also - I would like to animate these cubes from nothing (hidden inside the globe perhaps), to the position of their elevation (topography).

Using your example, is there a way to build a Plain Effector that could contain the shader field you built? How else might I make this happen? Thanks!

bronson_at_dnbstudios_dot_com,

The first important decision is certainly how the cubes have to be contributed. Are they distributed randomly on the surface or based the Sphere geometry, whereby the standard sphere has the typical longitude/latitude set up, only the density needs to be set more specifically. The cubes can be scaled to the mesh. The map is equirectangular so it would follow the mesh.

MoGraph is (simplified said) just a network of information. We can take the information from the map and supply it to the cubes. Since the elevation/topography is represented in gray-values, this is information. The Shader effector or the Shader Field can translate this.

In your case, you would like the cubes to be in the sphere during the start and then move out to their new place. Since the elevation of the world wouldn’t be really noticeable most of the time, we might exaggerate here the dimension.

Here is an example, with the Plain Effector as a core information hub.

Scene file
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/oZaVREqD8Iv9epc9jq3WCHwpve3XmQUUKP1EJ8DZA9M

Images from NASA

Let me know if you have any other question, I’m happy to look into it.

Cheers

That’s great. Thank you. Now I just need to figure out why that worked for you but didn’t work for me.

Thanks.

++bronson

Thanks for the feedback, ++bronson! Very kind of you.

If you like to have an upload link for the “non-working” file, please let me know. (Otherwise, please only dropbox, google, apple or amazon as cloud service)
I can check the set up if you like.

ENJOY

Dr. Sassi - I’m getting close to figuring this whole thing out. I have one last stumbling block. How do I get the cloner to not produce clones in the ocean? Is there a way to add an alpha channel to the cloner? I’d like to do this for two reasons: 1) I’d like to reduce the geometry of the scene. I’m using a separate plane to create the ocean so I can have a reflective ocean. So I don’t need to produce the cubes under this plane since I’ll never see them. And 2) I’m going to eventually add some animated noise to the plane effector which pushes the cubes closer to camera. If there are cubes under the ocean, when I add this effect, some of those cubes will pop up through the ocean plane.

I hope I explained myself clearly. Thanks for your help.

Hi ++bronson, (I hope I write your name correctly)

You can do it with two methods. One would be to create a Weight map with the Texture and use the Hide Selected command, while the Weight tag is selected, or you use the Selection Tag for this.

The weight map set up is here:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/2aigCB4Ygw2lKRLqUWFMxF2wUxbLKCdunlG7Q2MXB9z

The way I have used the Selection Tag was in my first example in this thread (post #1).

The Weight Tag works with the clones directly. Since I need 100% weight to make that working, I used a Range Mapper in the Weight Tag>Field. Since the Oceans are black (or very close to it), I have set the input/output values, so they create an invert effect with some tolerance.

All the best

P.S.: I hope this illustrates the process:

(one minute)
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/n1qNJZ5kqw30ugKfszPAu6fG1lvCe4rujibI5K36UNX