Glank: Sound Effector in Practice: The Ball Tapper

Photo of Joseph Herman

Instructor Joseph Herman

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  • Duration: 07:35
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  • Made with Release: 17
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In this video, we’ll learn how to set up the sound effector and dynamics for the anti-gravity ball.

In this case, a Mograph Cloner was used to create the ring of thin metal sticks that strike the metal ball. A Sound Effector was used to control the rotation of the sticks which cause the ball to be continuously pushed down with the help of rigid body dynamics. We’ll also see how to use a gravity object to compel the ball come back up.

Music and found object instruments by Paul Rudolph.

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Transcript

♪ [music] ♪ - In our last video, we used the Sound Effector with a fracture object. In this video, we'll be using it with a MoGraph cloner. We're starting out with this cube here, which has been resized to look like this stick, and it's a child of this null, which sits right on its edge. That null will be used by MoGraph as the axis of this shape. Let's go ahead and go into the MoGraph menu and make a cloner. Then we'll drag in the null and the cube inside of the cloner, and you can see how MoGraph begins to clone this object in a linear way, with the edge that the null is on is at zero. Next, we'll click on the cloner and we'll change the mode to radial because we want to clone this radially. We're going to change the plane to XZ. I want to make 12 clones of this stick, and make the radius 12 as well. Something like this. Next, we'll go to the transform tab of the cloner object, and I want to make the pitch rotation negative 30 degrees, something like this. Then I'll drag this material onto it. Now let's make a Sound Effector and bring in the audio. That tapping sound happens to be this track. Let's just make sure that the cloner is being affected by the Sound Effector, and let's rewind and see what happens. Actually, the tapping sound doesn't start until much later, so I'll move ahead a bit. Okay. We don't want the Sound Effector to affect the position of these sticks, so let's click on the Sound Effector and go to the parameter tab, uncheck position, and check rotation. Then, I'll set the pitch rotation to negative 130 degrees, which represents the maximum amount the Sound Effector will rotate the clones when the sound is at its highest level. Now let me hit play and see what happens. ♪ [music] ♪ There. That's what I want. Let's right click on the sticks that are being cloned and give it a collider body. This way, they'll react with the ball when they strike it. I've added the sphere and brought back some of the external structure so we can see things a little bit more in context. The first thing we'll do is we'll add a rigid body tag to the sphere. We'll go into simulation tags, rigid body. We know if we press play right now, the ball will just fall down because it's being influenced by gravity. What I'd like to do is have this thing, instead of falling down, to fall up, so it's always going to push into these sticks. To do that, I'm going to go into the simulate menu, and I'm going to create a gravity object. Let's take a look at this gravity object. Here it is. Notice that there's an arrow pointing down. That's the direction that the gravity's going. We don't want it to go down. We want it to push up. So we can rotate the gravity object or in the gravity object's object tab, we can set its acceleration to a negative amount. For the sphere, we're going to set it at negative 2200. We don't want this gravity object to affect everything in the scene. Otherwise, everything will just go flying up in the air. So, to make it only affect the sphere, let's click on the sphere's dynamic tag, and under the force tab, let's drag that gravity object into the force list. In the force mode, let's change it from exclude to include. This means that all the forces in this list will be included in the dynamics for this sphere. Okay. Now the ball wants to push up always into these clones of these sticks here. Let's hit rewind and hit play. Actually, the tapping doesn't start until about right here, so I'll fast forward a bit. ♪ [music] ♪ Okay. You can see that it's sort of working, but the ball's kind of uncontrollable and kind of gets pushed down too far, and then gets hit outside of the sticks and goes up into outer space. We don't want the ball to go so crazy like that, so let's see what we can do. I'll hit rewind, and let's try increasing the follow position amount to, let's say, two. Now, let's fast forward a bit to where the tapping starts and hit play. ♪ [music] ♪ It's doing a lot better, keeping the sphere in this general area, and it's looking good. Let's see if it stays in that little basket for the whole thing. Oops. Didn't make it. Let's rewind and let's try to increase this to four. Now, let's hit play and see what happens. ♪ [music] ♪ So far, so good. ♪ [music] ♪ Oops. Almost lost it there. Kind of like that though. ♪ [music] ♪ Well, it almost popped out at one point, but it seemed to make it. So I like that, and that's what I'm going to keep it as. Now that that's done, let's move on to the next part of the animation.
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