Effector question

[Sergei Opanasuk]

Hey Craig,
Triger in Dynamics/Dynamic Tag should be set to “At Velocity Peak”
For some reason effector does not work on MoText “letters” and “Words”.
It works when you insert your effector in “All” and “Lines” that are located on MoText Attribute Manager.

sergei

[Craig Whitaker]

Hey Sergei,

Thanks for the response. The strange thing is that the effector does work before I hit play. I have two words dropping onto a box using a rigid body tag and if I rewind the animation, I can drag the effector through and it works fine. However, if I animate the effector to pass through the animated/dynamic MoGraph Text once it has settled on the ground, the effector has no effect.

I hope I’m explaining this properly. Thanks again for any ideas you may have.

Craig

Craig Whitaker
MFA Candidate
New York University
http://www.craigwhitaker.net

[Sergei Opanasuk]

Craig,
Try to use MoGraph Cache Tag on your MoText object. Apply/Select the tag and hit bake button that is located in attribute manager. It will cache your animation data. See if it helps.

sergei

[Craig Whitaker]

Still no luck. MoGraph text doesn’t seem to respond to effectors once they are dynamic.

-Craig

Craig Whitaker
MFA Candidate
New York University
http://www.craigwhitaker.net

[Adam Trachtenberg]

What you’re trying to do is actually tricky because, as a general rule, objects are either controlled by a simulation or something else (keyframes, mograph, etc.), but they can’t be controlled by both at the same time.

There is a facility for blending physics with mograph, which is found in the dynamics tag’s Force tab. That’s the follow position/rotation parameters. But that’s probably not what you want as the blending tends to mess up both types of animation.

Here’s how I would deal with your situation:

1. Cache the simulation with the dynamics tag’s cache function;
2. Duplicate the cached text;
3. Make the copy editable at the frame where all of the text has stopped moving and pull all of the letters out of the resulting heirarchy;
4. Create a fracture object and drop all the letters in there;
5. Keyframe the visibility of the dynamic text and the static text at the frame where the text stops moving, so the dynamic text is visible up to that frame and the static text is visible after;
6. Apply your effector to the fracture object.

[Craig Whitaker]

Adam,

thank you very much. The problem I’m having is that once I make the copy editable, it snaps back to it’s original location.

Craig

Craig Whitaker
MFA Candidate
New York University
http://www.craigwhitaker.net

[Adam Trachtenberg]

It shouldn’t snap back to the original position if you cached the dynamics first — using the dynamics cache (not the mograph cache tag).

[Craig Whitaker]

Unfortunately, they are snapping back. I am using the dynamics cache option, not the mograph cache.

Not sure if this means anything, but the duplicated objects, their dynamics cache memory is reading 0 bytes.

-Craig

Craig Whitaker
MFA Candidate
New York University
http://www.craigwhitaker.net

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Yep, it means you have to hit the Bake button again after you copy the object.

[Craig Whitaker]

Adam. Problem solved. You Rock.

-Craig

Craig Whitaker
MFA Candidate
New York University
http://www.craigwhitaker.net