• Maxon Cinema 4D

  Plain Effector affecting entire cloner object instead of individual pieces

  Posted by Michael Zoppo on December 30, 2013 at 6:32 pm

  So I’ve got a pretty simple setup. I’ve got a linear cloner object with 43 nulls inside of it. Inside of each of the nulls is some simple geometry.

  So my layer browser looks like this :

  +Cloner Object
  –+Null
  —–Extrude Nurbs 1
  —–Extrude Nurbs 2
  –+Null.2
  —–Extrude Nurbs 3
  —–Extrude Nurbs 4

  Now when I go into my cloner object settings and mess around with the Y value under ‘per steps’ I can see all of the objects contained inside of the cloner start to randomly go up or down in the Y position at a staggered rate which is the effect I’m looking for I just want to use a plain effector to generate the effect because it gives me more precision than just animating that Y value in the cloner object settings. The problem is that when I add the plain effector and start messing around with it’s settings it’s affecting my cloner object as one whole object and not actually affecting the individual cloner pieces my cloner object is comprised of. I’ve of course changed the fall off from infinite to box because I know if it’s infinite it’s going to affect my entire object as 1 object. Just wanted to see if anybody had any advice

  I’ve included a screenshot of my cloner object settings, and my plain effector settings.

  https://www.dropbox.com/s/8l0bjiwol9wg1wt/Plain%20Effector%20Setup.png

  https://www.dropbox.com/s/blngosh0u6ew54s/Cloner%20Object%20Setup.png

  David Cabestany replied 11 years ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Adam Trachtenberg

  December 30, 2013 at 8:01 pm

  Well, that’s why they call it the “plain” effector! 🙂 It’s doing what it’s designed to do.

  Try using the step effector instead.
• 

  Michael Zoppo

  December 30, 2013 at 8:16 pm

  I guess I should have included this in my main post but I’ve used this technique before with the plain effector and it’s worked just fine. And my setup was pretty much exactly the same, I had a bunch of server clones rise up from below a surface at a staggered rate. I’m just trying to make these objects rise at a staggered rate. The Step effector does not yield the result I want. I want everything to start off at a low height at the SAME level then as I animate the plain effectors falloff bounding box I should see the different pieces start to rise to their resting position at a staggered rate. But for some reason they all rise as one piece.
• 

  Adam Trachtenberg

  December 30, 2013 at 9:12 pm

  I got you. As you say, it should work fine with falloff. But … looking more closely at your screenshots, I see that you’ve got all of your clones (the top nulls) in exactly the same place, which is why the falloff is affecting them all the same way. In order for mograph to adjust the clones’ positions individually, mograph has to establish the position of the objects.

  If you can post the scene file I’ll check and see if I can find a workaround.
• 

  David Cabestany

  April 21, 2015 at 9:35 pm

  I’m running into the same issue, except I’m using a fracture object, not a cloner. Same as Michael, I was able to use this before and now it’s not working. Would you mind helping me sort this out? I can post screenshots and projects as they are needed.

  Edit:
  Actually, this is probably more perplexing: If I move the objects the entire fracture object move as a whole, but if I rotate them then each object rotates on its own axis, the fracture object as a whole does not rotate.

  Thanks,
  D.

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