In this short tutorial, I show you some more of the features available in the Cinema4D MoGraph module.

By using the Sort option in the Cloner, you can use Effectors to determine which clone from the hierarchy is displayed.

The Sorted option in the Random Effector allows you to use each child of the cloner the same number of times, or in combination with the multishader you can ensure the shaders are distributed evenly across your clones. Great for things like playing cards where you don’t want duplicate clones.

To find out more visit Vimeo and watch the tutorial.

Sorted! from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

You can download the project file associated with this tutorial by clicking here.

Alex from aenhancers (awesome site by the way) asked an interesting question regarding the More Randomness post. He was interested to see if the same principle could be applied to lights.

So I decided to do a quick test. The answer is to use the MoGraph Color Shader in the Transparency Channel and add this to your lights. Then use the Random Effector on your Cloner Object.

Random Lights using the MoGraph Color Shader and Random Effector

Download an example scene here.

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.