Step Effector On top of Step Effector.

[Nick Campbell 0]

Howdy,

 

I have been playing with Mograph to try to get a specific effect and something is stumping me. I made a cloner object with an animated square. The Step effector makes a nice little snake animation offsetting up the clones . I want to put the snake animation in another cloner object and add yet another step effector to offset my snakes down the row. The problem is, the new step effector does NOT work with the first cloner object as a child. I attached my project to help explain. Hope that makes sense.

 

Thanks for any help in advance.

 

http://s3.amazonaws.com/gsg/StepEffectorQuestion.c4d.zip

[oms 0]

I think the real problem lies with the nesting of effectors that both use the 'Time Offset'. If you try a different parameter for 'Step Effector 2', like color or position, it's apparent that the effector is affecting the clones, I think C4D is just having a hard time trying to figure out the time offsets.

 

If you turn up the 'Time Offset' parameter on 'Step Effector 2' you can see that it's having some kind of effect but only on the bottom row. This leads me to believe that there's some kind of issue with the order in which these things are being calculated. Another solution that comes to mind is using one step effector's weight transform to affect the time offset of another step effector, but I think for that to work they would both have to be on the same cloner. You could also consolidate the setup to a single cloner in grid array mode, then get crazy with a shader effector. I dunno. If it's a serious project I would probably wire up some Xpresso to a bunch of duplicates of the individual columns as they are now.

[the_Monkey 8]

Yea... my understanding was that the time offset only worked with keyframed animations, but that may not be true.

I assume you know you can get your desired effect by making a single 8x8 Cloner Array with a single Step Offset?

 

-m

[oms 0]

I assume you know you can get your desired effect by making a single 8x8 Cloner Array with a single Step Offset?

Yeah, I should note my above post was written under the assumption that this wasn't an option for one reason or another, but it is definitely the simplest solution.

[Nick Campbell 0]

Yea... my understanding was that the time offset only worked with keyframed animations, but that may not be true.

I assume you know you can get your desired effect by making a single 8x8 Cloner Array with a single Step Offset?

 

-m

 

 

True, That would work in this case, but this is more an example then a final idea. I would like to use animations as I would PRECOMPS in AE. In other words, I would like to use the cloner to keep offsetting animations, upon animations. I use this technique a lot in AE and would like to have the same freedom in Cinema. Any workaround? Would a "Baked" version of the animation work?

 

Thanks

Nick

[yoni bendor 0]

Thank you for bringing this issue up again.

try version 9.6 where this actually WORKS in , for some reason since version 10

this feature stopped working, if you find a workaround PLEASE let me know!

Edited May 14, 2009 by yoni bendor

[TimC 0]

I'm not sure you can do what you want using the time offset feature. You may be able to do it using inheritance effectors, but it seems a little tricky!

 

I had a little play and came up with some interesting results, but none of them are the result you are after. I may persevere when I have more time, but too busy right now to keep trying.

 

Interesting challenge though.

 

Here's my tests with the inheritance effector

 

cheers

Tim