Generating Motext ‘objects’ randomly

[Steve Bentley]

If you put them in a cloner, you can just enable the random selection under the “clones” parameter in the Object tab of the cloner.
That will spit out all the objects in the cloner in a random order. Then use a Random Effector to position your elements in space randomly. Or better yet: a Shader Effector – it’s a random effector on stereoids that lets you use a texture (usually with an animated noise) to control the random positions of the objects emitted.

And it may have just been in the writing, but you don’t actually apply the random effector by putting the cloner “in” a random effector. You have to assign (or drag and drop) the random effector to the Effector tab of the Cloner object (or just choose a new effector while the cloner is selected and it will be assigned automatically.)

You could also do this with expresso and make a link list of the objects and have C4D pick the items from that list to generate from an emitter in a random order by injecting a random number into the Index port of the Link List node.

[Bha Vana]

Steve,

thanks for several things:

1) the terrific suggestion: it worked ☺
2) the alternative way to randomize location, that’s clever. Since I’m trying to get the numbers onto a conveyor belt, I’d rather have them generate to their location a little more predictably for this project.
3)thanks for clarifying my hierarchy of operations, I knew it was wrong to write it that way, but suspected that may be part of my problem in how I was thinking through it.
4) Really excited to try the expresso idea. In fact, I started there as it makes more sense, not only for the problem I posted, but especially for the next area of animation where I will need to direct each #, based on a range, into different silos and I hoped expresso could let me set the term for a range (i.e., .all #’s b/w 01¢-25¢ for one silo, all #’s b/w 26¢-99¢ for another and so forth) but i just could even get a toe hold on how to set up the nodes. I have tried the Cineversity site as well as YouTube – no luck yet – but I will be sure to try your suggestion.

Again, thank you.

[Steve Bentley]

For expresso you can pump in a random number into the link list to pick the object from the list, and then you can examine the output of the list on the other side of the node. You can do a compare on that output (either via the name of the object or it’s position in the list) to send that object output to whatever “silo” goes with that object.

It’s really just a bunch of “if” statements. You can do that either with a bunch of compare nodes or it might be cleaner to use a coffee script where you can use the “switch” command to send a single input (of the output of the link list) to different outputs based on some parameter. It’s like you are sending models (or in your case words) through a pipeline that shifts to deliver them to the right spot.