Combining Hair and MoGraph in Cineversity Brand ID: Create Framework by Cloning onto Object's Edges

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Instructor Ranger&Fox

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  • Duration: 04:35
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  • Made with Release: 18
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Using an asset from the ident, preparing the mograph cloner and adding a cube to be cloned along each edge of the play button.

Importing the play button geometry asset from the Cineversity Ident, the aim of this lesson is to prime the mograph cloner. Create a simple cube and adjust the size to be narrower than its length, once this is added to the cloner, we’ll set the cloner type to object and add our asset play button to clone on to. Set the cloner to edge mode and adjust the scale on edge to allow the cloner to fix the length of the cube to the length of the edge it is assigned to.

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Transcript

Hi, this is Brett Morris, and in this video, we'll use a prepared 3D object of the play button from the ident and then start to set up our MoGraph cloner to attach clones to the edges of the object. So let's just start off by turning off our Hair and Polygon from the previous lesson, looking at a clean scene, and I've actually copied the PlayButton to the clip board and as I pace the play button, we can clearly see that this is a simple bit of geometry. It's low poly, which has been generated through a spline procedure, which I've discussed in my recent NAB tutorial, that can also be found on Cineversity. That process is quite simple from taking your spline, extruding it, running it through poly reduction, and a little bit of tweaking gives us this bit of geometry. What we're looking to do in this lesson is actually create a cloner that has kind of like a dynamic clone scaling feature, so that our clones will automatically scale themselves along the edge of this object and each clone will be dynamically linked to the length of the edge that it's being cloned onto. It's a really simple feature that can yield powerful results. So let's start off by making the view port a little bit easier to look at, as we want to see through the play button, so we can see all sides and my little go-to technique for something like this is actually creating a Display Tag. On the top Use channel, let's activate that and in Shading Mode, switch it to Lines. Now, we can easily see through the object, and yet, if we render, we can see that it's still geometry. It's a really helpful little tag because if I turn that off in the render mode, when we render, we don't see anything, but it's still active in our editor viewer. Let's go up to MoGraph and create a Cloner and let's just drop this below our PlayButton and we'd like to actually use a Cube as the object we're going to clone along these edges. So I know from experience that I actually want to reduce the X parameter, and let's move this down to 10, as well as the Z, so you can see we're looking at a cube that is 10 by 200 by 10, and if we drop this inside of our Cloner, set the cloner's Mode to Object, and once we drag our PlayButton into the Object link, you can see that the clones are doing something. They're being cloned onto the object all right. If you look at the Distribution, we're actually cloning these cubes onto the Vertex of the object. So for this particular exercise, we want to use the edge and you can see that it's looking pretty good, but it's a little bit wild and if we actually activate the Scale on Edge, all of the clones adjust themselves but some are smaller than others and what's happening is the cloner is actually assigning each clone to the edge. It's looking at the length of the edge that it's cloning the object onto and then we've got this 50% value, so it's actually scaling it 50% of the length of the edge it's being cloned onto. So if we increase this to 100%, you can see that we're starting to fill in all of those empty edges. So now we're looking at basically our play button again, but with much thicker geometry. So I know I'd like to reduce this down to, say, 5 by 5, and in fact, I could probably go a little bit lower and do it 3 by 3. So this is really helpful because now we can easily see that we've got geometry along each edge, and if we were getting fancy and moving some of this geometry, as we move these points around, the clones are dynamically scaling along the edges. So this is really cool because we've now created geometry that's dynamically adjusting itself per edge. In this video, we set up a MoGraph cloner system to clone cubes along the edges and have them scaled to the edge length. Next up, we're going to integrate our previously created hair system to this cloner.
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