From the course: Cinema 4D R19 Essential Training: Motion Graphics

Deforming objects with Effectors - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D R19 Essential Training: Motion Graphics

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Deforming objects with Effectors

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- [Instructor] So far we've seen how effectors can be used to modify clones, but effectors can also be used to modify and deform geometry. So, let's take a look. I'm just going to grab a sphere here and copy it into a new scene. And we'll just take off this effector, and we'll remove the material, and let's just focus in on this sphere. So, I'm going to create a new MoGraph random effector, and I'm going to make it a child of the sphere. And this is the key to the setup, really. We have a tab over here called Deformer, and if I change this to point, you can see something crazy happening here. All the points on that sphere are being deformed based on these position values. So, if I lower this down, you can see now, we've got a little bit more control over that. It's worth noting at this stage that if the random effector is a child it will work, and it can also work at the same level of hierarchy as the sphere. So, if I make a null object, and put the random effector in the same level as the sphere, then we'll get the same kind of effect. We can use falloffs to manipulate this, which becomes very interesting. So, if I choose a linear falloff and change it to the positive y-axis, I might even try the negative y-axis, and then if we start to move this up, you can see that we are mixing the effect of the deformation, so we've got more of an effect at the top and then nothing at the bottom. So, this is quite nice with this low poly look. If you wanted to smooth out the geometry, we'll just add a phong tag to the sphere. That smoothed everything out, and if you wanted to go even further, you could also add a subdivision surface and maybe make the random effect through a child. So, the order becomes very important here. So, to get that effect, you need to have this kind of setup. Whereas, if the random effect is at this level, it's going to see all the points of the subdivision surface. So, we'll bring that underneath, and this is the look that we want to create. And then if we can move the random effect through and animate it and... really get a pretty interesting, unique-looking sphere. So, come back to this file and have a look at what's happening. We're also using another plane effector this time to deform the geometry of this disc, and what I say is if you want to look at this file, just come in and either delete or disable the MoGraph Cache, and then you'll be able to work with the effectors that we have in this scene. So, that was a look at how we can use effectors to deform geometry. It's really, really useful to know that you can do that. And it's also a lot of fun to play with, too.

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