Logo Reveal - Character Animation Using MoGraph: Setting Up the Procedural Carrot Squash and Stretch

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  • Duration: 05:46
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  • Made with Release: 19
  • Works with Release: 19 and greater

In this Video we will set up the Carrot Squash and stretch base animation using MoGraph and Clone Blending. The initial Squash and stretch will be generated by a Deformer, and the Blending with a Plain Effector, Using a Linear Falloff.

You can find all tutorial project files attached to this tutorial.

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Transcript

- [Athanasios Pozantsis] In this video, we will set up the carrot squash and stretch base animation using MoGraph and Clone Blending. So here is the carrot and you can download this file. And what I'm going to do is go and add a squash and stretch Deformer. I'm going to put it as a sibling so it effects all the other models and what I'm going to do is select it. I'm going to bring this closer so we can see everything and go to the "attributes," which I'm going to lift up and bring the top further down so it's just above the actual carrot. You can see the visual indicator, the purple line, and I'm going to do the same for the bottom one and raise it so that it's just above the tip. Fantastic, and I'm going to use the factor to make it squash and stretch. So the base of my squash and stretch animation is ready. So right-click and reset to default to go to 100%, or you can type 100%, doesn't make a difference. So we have the carrot in its normal state, let's say "normal." Excellent, and I'm going to make a copy of this, so drag, press Cmd or Ctrl, release the mouse, and now we have a second copy. I'm going to make the first one invisible, call this "Squashed," "Squashed," and select this and let's put 50 here. You can make this any value you like. Excellent, and then again, I'm going to make another copy and I'm going to call this "Stretched," "Stretched." Select the Deformer and go here and say 150, and this is my stretched state. So here we have three states and now let's go and add them to a Cloner. Go to MoGraph, Add a Cloner, and I'm going to close these, select them, drag and drop them under the Cloner, select the Cloner, make the mode Grid Array, and make this 15, Tab 1, Tab 15, press Enter. And now we have all these beautiful carrots in our Viewport. And by default, the MoGraph Cloner is in Iterate mode, which means it's going to iterate from the normal to the squashed to the stretched and the same thing again. I want to set it to Blend mode so it blends between the clones. And you can see now it's blending to the stretched and the squashed and the normal one. Let's turn it around so you can see it better. There you go. So what I need to do now is do the setup to initialize these and give them all their initial position. So with the Cloner selected, let's go to MoGraph and add a Plain Effector. I'm going to call this "Plain Start." And what we are going to do is go to the parameter, turn off the position, set the Modify Clone to 100%, and you can see that now they're all in their final state, the stretched state. So let's go to the Effector and in the maximum value...if this is closed, just twirl it open, just type zero and now everything is in its normal position. Now, one thing I want to do is make my Deformer invisible because it irritates me that I see those lines in the Viewport. Fantastic. Let's close these again, fold them in, select a Cloner, and because there are too many carrots here and it becomes a bit cluttered, temporarily, I'm going to set my Z-count to five. Excellent, and I'm going to turn it this way and select the Cloner and I'm going to add a Plain Effector that's actually going to do the squashing, stretching. So with this selected, I'm going to turn off all the parameters and turn on the Modify Clone and then go to Falloff and set this to linear. Make it Plus X, so it's oriented on the X, and set the falloff to be 100% of the shape of the Falloff Effector. So now, if I move through my carrots with my Effector, it goes from normal to squash to stretch. Now, this is not exactly what I want. I want them to go from normal to squash to stretched to squashed to normal again. So how do I do that? Well, it's quite simple. You go to your effector's Falloff, the one that's doing the squashing, and in the Spline, you right-click and you say "Reset" so now we can see a visual representation of the actual falloff we had. So I'm going to take the final state here and drag it over towards the middle. Now, if this is twirled closed, you don't see any parameters underneath, so click on this very, very small black arrow and you'll see a host of parameters. Just double-click on the point X and make this 0.5 so it's right in the middle. And then we need to go and add a point here, so press Cmd or Ctrl on the keyboard and just click anywhere, and then drag this down here. So now what do we have? We have a situation where when the Falloff enters the Cloner, it starts squashing, then it stretches when it reaches the 50% mark, and then it squashes again, and then it goes back to normal. So, this is the basis of our animation and we are going to tweak this as we go.
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