Use MoGraph Effectors to Control Cloner Blend Mode

Photo of Rick Barrett

Instructor Rick Barrett

Share this video
  • Duration: 03:18
  • Views: 9447
  • Made with Release: 17
  • Works with Release: 17 and greater

MoGraph Effectors provide artistic control over clone blending

Gain artistic control of the Cloner Blend mode using the Modify Clone parameter of C4D's MoGraph Effector. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to set clones to the initial or final blend state, transition the blend using falloff, and create variation with the Random Effector. This tutorial builds upon our introduction to Cloner Blend mode.

show less

Transcript

- In this tutorial, we are going to look at how you can use MoGraph's Effectors to control the blend mode on the cloner. In a previous tutorial, we already looked at how the blend mode will allow you to smoothly interpolate between the objects that are children of the cloner. Here we have one version of the snowflake, I'll hide the axis, and here we have another. Here you can see that in the grid array we have got the first version and the last, and we are smoothly interpolating between those two versions. Well, what we want to do now is actually control this with effectors, which is where things really get fun. The first thing you might want to do is zero out the blend state, so that all the clones are the same. To do that, what you are going to do is go in and add a plain effector, and again, make sure that the cloner is selected so that the effector is automatically applied. The key parameter here is the modified clone. We will go ahead and turn off position for now and increase the modified clone. You can see now with the modified clone at 100%, we are getting the final blend state on all of the clones. Now, to get the initial blend state, you might think you can just do minus 100%, but that doesn't really work out. So, what you need to do instead is invert the effect of this particular effector, and the easiest way to do that is to go onto the effector tab and just change the maximum value here to minus 100%. That basically reverses the whole effector. Now, of course we can layer additional effectors on top of this and take advantage of falloff. Let's go in and add an additional plain effector. Again, in the parameter tab we are going to turn off position and modify clone 100%. You can see as I did that, we made those clones all the final blend state. I'll go to the falloff tab here and we will just enable the linear falloff and I'm going to rotate this 90 degrees. Now if I show my axis, I can move the falloff zone here and actually blend between those snowflake states. That's something else we can do. What I like to do, I'm just going to turn off both of those, what I like to do a lot is simply go in and add a random effector, and go in here and randomize the clone parameter. So, now we have got all these random snowflakes, and if I want to change the distribution I can always go in here and adjust the seed value. What is also kind of cool is if you go in here in the random mode you can change this to noise, and now it is actually going to animate between the various blend states. That is a little bit too fast, so we can bring the animation speed down to something like 25%. I think that is a cool effect there as well. So, that is a look at some of the ways you can use MoGraph Effectors to control the cloner's blend mode, and remember the key here is the modified clone parameter, which changes the blend state from the initial blend state to the final blend state.
Resume Auto-Scroll?