How to make one random effector ONLY effect a multishader in my color channel, while another random effector ONLY effects the color shader in my transparency channel?

[Don Jenkins]

Yea i really like the flexibility the shader effector provides, but I’m afraid I’ll come across that problem where it will start to spazz out if I make the character/cube object move like how it did before, however I will try it as soon as I get my hands on my desktop, when you get the chance to check out the file I sent ya ya, please have a look through what I have going’s on to get it to how it is currently, I also didn’t know about the priority order thing you mentioned regarding the order of effectors in a effectors tab, that’s neat!

[Steve Bentley]

I think I see where you are going now. The issue is going to be changing the texture images over time.

The simplest way, is to do what we’ve got working already (take the texture from my file I sent and bring that into your project – the one you had in the last project didn’t have the Mograph color shader in the alpha channel so your random effector wasn’t doing anything – the noise needs to move on the random effector so that the alpha changes over time).
But instead of images in the mograph multishader use movies of the images changing – that way you can get the transition effect you are looking for as the images change. A different movie for each texture slot or use the animation features in the texture tag to shift the animation – map the animation to a different set of keyframes for each of the mograph mutlishaders channels.

If you are OK having the images pop when they change then you could use the variation shader (C4dR17 and up I believe). Load the images (not movies) into the variation shader in the color channel just like you do with the Multishader (Add from folder) and then animate the probability setting for each of your images loaded. (one keyframe at the beginning and one at the end of the entire animation). This will cause the images to change over time (among all you have loaded). but they will change instantly or pop.
Keep the alpha of this material set to the mograph color shader just like we’ve been doing and that will look after your random transparency (or you could use the variation shader on the alpha channel and just do a grad from back to white instead of images and animate the grad or the random color slot)

There’s one other way – when you select the texture tag on an object, you can keyframe that material in the attributes manager. With the original material listed in the Material slot of the attributes of a texture tag, hit the keyframe button, go to another keyframe and drop a new material in that slot, hit the keyframe button again. The textures will dissolve from one to the other between those keyframes.
Now that you know how to do that, open each of the textures in the multishader – twirl down the black triangle next to the Texture 1 (2,3,4 etc) and keyframe the file slot – then move to another keyframe and get another file from your drive and keyframe that, Repeat as necessary. Unlike the texture tag on an object that’s keyframed, these will pop as they change over time.

Because the length of the object that is spline-wrapped will change over time the textures are going to stretch. Because you are spinning the spline you will see the textures edge-on sometimes – this may or may not show due to your spiral. I’m not sure why this is needed. You could have the swept objects along the traces always face camera. Remember much of the new tech in C4D is just old tech in a new wrapper – tracers and objects are just paths swept along a spline. Mograph is just a wrapper on what we could always do in expresso. So many of the old techniques apply to the new features.

Finally you might want to tap Adam Trachtenberg and Brian Jones in this forum as they have done a bunch in this area as well. The issue is the changing textures over time – at least I think that’s what you are after.

I thought perhaps we could have two shader effectors on the cloner- one generating a black and white noise and one generating a color noise – then we could have the transparency be affected by the B&W noise and the image chosen driven by the hue of the other noise. I haven’t been able to make that work yet.

There’s another way altogether that might be more organic. Have your points emit a few TP particles every 10 frames or so, short lifespans and with no velocity so they are just left in the characters wake. Then randomly, you could join those particles with a spline – like the plexus effect and sweep an object along those connect lines – You might even be able to do proper lightning if you made a connection algorithm that used the emission order or particle ID so you could branch the connecting lines.