Stacking Mograph Effectors in Cinema 4D

Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey here for school of motion. And in this lesson, we are going to take a look at a cool technique. You can use with some of the MoGraph effectors in cinema 4d. The idea here is to get you more comfortable with the MoGraph effectors and how they work. So you can start using them in your projects to pull off really complicated looks and animations with minimal effort. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. So now let's jump into cinema 4d. Alright, so we're in cinema and I have a, uh, I have a blank project here. I'm going to set this up to be half HD, nine 60 by five 40. Um, I usually like to work at 24 frames a second.
Joey Korenman : Um, and then remember when you change the frame rate and cinema, you have to change it in your render settings. You also have to change your project settings, which you can bring up by hitting command D um, and change that's 24 as well. All right. So now, um, you know, you saw at the beginning of this video, uh, kind of a preview of the effect we're going for here. So I'm gonna kind of walk you through my thought process, um, when I was building that, and hopefully that'll help you get a better grasp on how Mo graph works and how you can, um, you know, stack effectors and do different things to build these complicated effects. Um, so what I wanted to do is basically have these cubes animate on in some really cool intricate way and build a sphere. Um, so what I, the first thing I did was I created a sphere, um, and I left it as a standard sphere.
Joey Korenman : There's a whole bunch of different kinds of spheres. Um, but I knew that what I was going to essentially do was clone cubes on every single polygon, uh, of this sphere. Um, and so leaving it as the standard kind of helps because it's already sort of set up with, with square polygons on the sphere. So you're kind of already starting with the right shape. All right. So, uh, move this back to zero cause I just nudged it. So the next thing I'm going to do is, uh, create a cube and I'm going to hide my sphere for a second and I'm going to make the cube smaller and, uh, you can always resize these things, uh, later on, but it's nice to start kind of with the right general size. All right. So I made this cube 50 centimeters in every direction. Um, so now if I add a cloner to the scene, so if I go up to MoGraph cloner and I drag the cube into the cloner, you can see by default that cloner set to linear mode, and that's not what we want, what we want is object mode.
Joey Korenman : Um, so object mode basically puts clones onto another object. So my cube will be cloned onto whatever object I tell the cloner. So let's switch this to object and you'll see. Now we have a little spot down here to add an object. Um, and I'm gonna drag this sphere down into here and you'll see now we've got a whole bunch of cubes cloned onto the sphere and it looks really funky and it's overlapping and it's not exactly what we want. This is a few reasons. One is, um, the cloner right now. Um, it's D this distribution setting here is very important when you're an object mode. So this tells MoGraph where to put the clones on your object. So right now it's saying, put a cube on every Vertex of that sphere. So we turn the corner off for a second. Turn the sphere on the Vertex is, are the points.
Joey Korenman : Okay? So it's putting a cubit every single point, and that's not, I mean, that's fine. That's not really a big deal, but what I really wanted was for it to just put one on every, uh, polygon. All right. So there'll be a lot less of them. Um, all right. So let me hide the sphere again, turn the corner back on, and I'm going to switch this distribution from Vertex to polygon center. Okay. So now we have a few less clones, but it still doesn't look right. Um, so then the next thing we need to do is make the sphere bigger because what's happening is these cubes are overlapping and that's why you're getting this weird funky look. So if I click on the sphere and just increase the radius, you can see now the cubes have enough room and they're separating. Okay. Um, and I kind of want a little space in between them so that there's no weird intersections, even at the top and the bottom of the sphere where they're closer together.