Cloner Visibility through Effectors
When using MoGraph in Cinema4D, the effectors can be used for several things other than affecting the position, rotation or scale. Another option is to control the visibility of clones. If you switch to the Parameter tab of an appropriate effector, scroll down and you will see an innocent little check box labeled Visibility. Now you won’t find this on all the effectors as it just wouldn’t make sense on some of them. On the effectors where you can use it however, this check box . . . believe it or not . . . makes clones visible or invisible!
Visibility Checkbox
You can use this to simply control which clones are visible and which are not. Of course you can use the Falloff to control this too. I’m made a small example scene that demonstrates this using the Random, Shader and Step Effectors. Although the Step Effector is only really using Falloff as it’s control.
Here’s a preview of the result.
You can download this example scene here.
What about the plain effector? I can never get that to work with visibility.
Sometimes it feels like I almost have my head around how fall-off, weight, and mograph in general work, but also that there’s a big fat brick wall between my head and enlightenment, and I’m constantly bashing my head against it!
Hi Jacob,
To use the Plain Effector with visibility, switch to the Effector Tab and then fold down the Min/Max parameters. Set the Maximum to 0% and the Minimum to 100%. It should now work with visibility.
Per-Anders, one of the genius Maxon programmers behind the MoGraph Module, gave me this explanation of why it is like this.
“the reason is simply that under normal circumstances the visibility is turned off if the value is below 50%, but as the plain effector has nothing but 100% driving it’s values (no shader or noise or anything like that) then of course visibility gets turned on by it rather than off by default, and of course other effectors before it might have turned the visibility off, so it will re-enable those clones..”
Hope that helps. Thanks Per for the helpful explanation!
No wonder I’d never got it to work. Thanks Tim and Per!
You make crazy stuff, MLG, FXphd, and now this blog, with amaizing tips. I have a problem with cinema 4d, that sure you have a solution for it. Here I go; I try to render hair with global ilumination, but I always get a black surface, without light or texture, only pure black. Do you know how can i fix that without make extra lights? I render the scene with sun light.
Thank you.
You have to either render the hair as a separate pass and composite it with the GI render or if you want the hair to work with GI then you need to use polygon hair, so in the hair object generate tab set the type to flat, triangle etc.. You can then use the hair shader on this. The results will differ from the post effect but it will work with GI
I’m trying to make a clone invisible. I’ve attached a null to the clone I want removed and a Plain Effector is attached to that, so I am able to make it invisible during part of the animation, but sometimes it re-appears or causes other clones to disappear. How can I make a clone invisible using just xpresso?
Any help would be awesome.
Just came across your website today… you’ve done some beautiful stuff.
This tutorial was exactly what i needed, to make clones invisble. However, is there a way to make them slowly fade instead of just popping out of existence? Would that require more advanced programming?
Thanks!
@Orien
You could probably acheive this using the MoGraph colour shader in the transparency channel and then driving this with an effector and falloff.
This is what i was searching for, but it seems i’m too stupid to apply the information to my current issue.
I am trying to get a text to fade in;
Basically the letters are at a 90 degree angle (showing the backside of each letter to the camera), then the plane effector moves through the text, and rotates each letter 90 degrees to the camera. I am trying to get it to work to not only rotate but also fade in, and having each letter at Alpha=0 before it is rotated by 90 degrees.
I am using mograph text and a plane effector with rotation which gives me the desired text rotating in effect, but i cant get the transparency to work.
I tried using the color mode but i dont seem to understand what i need to do to link this up to the alpha.
enabling visibility does nothing and changing the min/max values also has no effect. i am sure i am missing a small thing, maybe you can give me a tip what to do?
Is this doable with mograph only or does something like this require scriptwork?
Thanks a lot!
@Mike It is doable without scripting for sure, but it isn’t something I can give you the answer to in a few sentences I’m afraid
thanks Tim!
i expected it to be more complex, so thats fine.
Maybe you consider it in a future tutorial clip
Thanks Tim, awesomely useful tidbit in that.
I was wondering if you knew of a way to use two random effectors on a cloner object? Basically what I want to be able to do is use a random effector to control the visibility of a cloner object separately to another random effector that is controlling random scale/position.
Any ideas?
@Ben You can apply two random effectors to the same cloner no problem at all. Set one to control visibility and one to control position & rotation.
Duh.. thanks Tim. Don’t know why that didn’t work for me initially but its solved all my problems.
Cheers!
Ben