Cineversity

Hey everyone,

I’ve got an issue that has me pulling my hair out. I have what’s basically a disco ball made out of various little 16:9 tv screens. I’ve set it up using a main fracture cloner so that I can use effectors on the overall ball, but nested inside the fracture object is each ring of the disco ball (made out of radial cloners), so that I can effect each ring separately.

I’m using a Plain Cloner with a Sound Field falloff so that the panels of the rings can push out in reaction to an audio track. And then I added a delay effector on the effector stack below that to smooth out the audio field, as the animation is too jagged without it.

Everything plays in the view window how I want it, and if I do a software preview it plays the way I want it as well. The problem comes when it’s time to render. The final rendered product is acting as if it were ignoring the delay effector.

So then I added a mograph cache tag to the top mograph object (the fracture object), baked it, and turned off all the effectors to make sure it was actually reading from the cache. That also plays perfectly in the viewer window and from software render.

But when I render—it’s not reading the mograph cache, or any of the effectors. Nada. If I keep the cache on and turn the effectors back on, it renders with effectors, but once again it’s ignoring the delay effector.

Any ideas on what I’m doing wrong? Is the mograph cache not able to bake to child mograph objects underneath it? I’m uploading a project file here. Any idea would be appreciated. Thanks!

I think my file was too big for the attachment limit so here’s a google drive link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AxmTP9uX8Pt6G3e7YBjXLTToqqAD_dlK/view?usp=sharing

Hi Matthew.G.Tinley.-ND,

Thanks for the file and for using Google Drive.

Please have a look at the two files below (one zip file)
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/P0yIBw6q1EahlfM1vMvVsRCCeNhuFDtqGYltpgwGlAj

I would avoid placing Effectors and fields under the Fracture. When you need to switch them off, the Cache might be confused.

My idea of setting up a scene is to produce the information needed to move, rotate or scale any clones first, then produce geometry.

Each generator (icon color: green) will produce the given geometry again and again. So producing that as late as possible is an advantage. You will see in the second file (your objects are replaced with just cubes) that the whole setup is smaller.

The rotation of the rings is based on a pair of Time Effectors, and one turns them all in one direction. The other is based on a Linear field curve in different directions and speed, which creates a two-way variety.

All the best

Thanks for the fast reply, Dr. Sassi, and for taking the time to make these files! I will move the effectors up above the fracture object and see if that helps. I like your simplified version of the Mograph, but one of the reasons I built it in such a convoluted way is that I need to have control of each individual ring of the ball. There are moments where I need the disco rings to spin consecutively, and moments when I need the rings to stop at a specific location. That’s why I didn’t just use an object cloner.

I think I still do have a question about the proper way to use mograph cache if there’s nested cloners. Do you put the mograph cache on the top mograph object in the hierarchy? Do all the other objects in the hierarchy need to have the mograph cache tag? Or is trying to use a mograph cache in that way something that’s just not going to work?

Thanks for the kind feedback, Matthew.G.Tinley.-ND.

The Cache should sit on top:
https://help.maxon.net/c4d/r25/en-us/Default.htm#html/TMOGRAPH_CACHE.html?TocPath=Object Manager|Tags Menu|Various Tags|MoGraph Cache|_____0

However, your question led me to explore it with Vibrate included; as you can see, I prefer a native MoGraph solution.

The file below allows clearly demoing that the Vibrate Tag has no option to be changed after the Cache Tag is working.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/V1eMvZxNVz15JxapEpwAjMp8FHbvggyu9xeS1g4djCS

While the Cache is active and the scene is playing, dial into the Vibrate Tag an extreme Position value (e.g.,55555).

Now disable the Cache. Can you see the change?

In my version with the Time Effectors, I have a Linear Field, which is remapped to a curve. This curve defines the resulting rotation of each ring. (It should have more points, one point for each ring.)

Adjust the curve (Remapping) and see how that affects the rotation speed.

All the best