Delay appearance of clones in mograph

[Mylenium]

Hi

I realise there is another thread about mograph delay today but as my question is different I didnt want to hijack that thread.

I have a small scene, a cloner with radial clones expands to create a semi arch of clones, that cloner is in a 2nd cloner which lines them up linearly. I then use step effector set to time to delay the expansion of each clone until the previous clone has done its animation.(imagine a sort of bouncing trajectory). You can see the sort of thing in the attached still.

My question is how to delay the appearance of the next clone in the chain, as you can see in the picture the start of each next clone is visible. I tried animating visibility of the initial cube, hoping the step effector would delay that, but all that happened is the start cubes all appear before the initial arch animation begins.

Any suggestions ?

Thanks

Trig

Sounds like you're taking the long way round... Unless there is a specific reason, you shouldn't use this setup. Just create your trajectories as a spline object and then use a spline effector to control animation.

Mylenium

[Trig Fuller]

Hi

thanks for your reply. Your videos on mograph have been the spur to my experimentation.

I accept that this particular example could be done a different way. But is there any way to delay appearance of a clone that is animated in some way, delay in such a way that as each clone appears it runs through its animation. I tried just animating the number of clones, while at the same time animating the time offset of a step effector, but got some weird results.

EDIT:

Hi again, I tried the spline effector and the effect is subtly different to what I want(not in a good way). The following movie shows what I mean.

http://www.pvcfilms.tv/mgbouncy.html

1 is the effect I am after, this is done as I described in first post. Each arch, once complete doesnt move again, ie only animation is leading edge of path.

2 Is using spline effector, animating the end position from 0-100%, you see all the cubes grouped up together, gradually spreading out.

3 Is the same as 2 except this time I animated the number of clones in time with the spline effectors end position. It's closer to what I want, but the cubes still move.

I worked out that I could just use a boole to get rid of the unwanted cubes using the first method, but I plan to stick this cloner setup in another cloner so these things are sort of randomly rotated and positioned.

Any suggestion how to get each clone to appear ?

Trig

[Per-Anders]

Hi, actually what you want to do here is very easy, although slightly more in depth, so I've included a breakdown of everything I did in the example file along with why it was done, hopefully in a way that's understandable (it's really only 6 or so steps including the setting of parameters and animating the elements you want).

The basic premise we're going to follow is that each arc is it's own animation, and that theline is made up of a number of these arcs. So what that means is basically we need two cloners, one to do the arc animation, and one to make our line of arcs.

For our arc in the example file here all i've done is made a radial cloner, and animated the start/end position, you could use a spline if you wanted more control and use that as the object (no need for a spline effector here). Basically just getting the one arc in place. I animated that cloenrs end angle over 20 frames (remember that number we'll need it for some very basic math in a moment), and also on the first frame animate the clone count from 0 to my final number (15 in this case). So now we have a nice simple arc animation.

Next to clone in a line of these, i bunged that into a linear cloner, i set the X position difference for each clone to the be same as the diameter of my radial cloner (i.e. 2X the radius which was 250, so a 500 unit gap). Now i have a row of these thigns all animating together.

Next step is I want them to animate sequentially. This is where the "Time Offset" parameter comes into play. What I did was added a step effector, applied just to the linear array cloner. I switched off everything in it, but then went to the "Other" tab on it and changed the Time Offset value to be 20 (my number of frames for my animation form start to end) times the number of clones in the linear cloner (but minus one), in fact I set up a little xpresso to do this automatically for you in here, so you can change the number of clones in the linear cloner to suit your needs. Why do this? Because the step effector basically outputs a value from 0% to 100% along the curve graph element that's in it's interface along the number of clones, so left o that little graph is clone number 1, and right is your last clone, that means that the offset for time by the last clone has to be the total ammount of time offset needed for the very last clone to animate at the correct time (the time offset value is sort of like shifting the animation keys and sequences of an object as many frames as you put in along), so we need each clone to animate 20 frames after the previous one, given that and the fact that the step effector goes from 0% to 100% along all the clones by index then the total offset needs to be 20 * the number of clones minus 1, because otherwise the last clone would start animating on the very last frame of the step graph but you want it to finish animating on that very last frame.

Voila we now have something like your animation, that you can reuse for whatever you want.

Good luck with it, I hope this helps! [edit : did some tidyup]

[Trig Fuller]

Hi

outstanding !

I had a feeling it might be something to do with adjusting the count and time offset, it had just not occured to me to use xpresso to achieve it, trying it manually just didnt work.

Thank you so much.

Trig

[Per-Anders]

Well you can do it manually just fine, it's judt a number that goes into the time offset value (number of clone minus one multiplied by the length of your animation for a single clone). This just makes it automatic so you can reuse the scene and change the elements around.

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