CGTalk - Question: Clamping Mograph values

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Kokosing

01-29-2007, 09:32 AM

I've trying to animate several hundred objects falling from the sky and landing on the ground - sort of like a rain storm.

I've created each object and placed them all in a fracture object. I've got no problem making them all fly down to earth using various effectors, but when I do this, each object's y movement is scaled so that all object's land at roughly the same time, no matter how high they were to begin with. This makes the whole thing look way to digital. So I'm thinking of another way to handle this.
It seems like an obvious way to do this would be to have the effector push things below y=o and clamp each object's y position to 0.

Does this make sense?

How do I do this?

Thanks,

W

Per-Anders

01-29-2007, 09:46 AM

There's a couple of ways to do this (not including using the drop to surface effector in the SDK).

The first way is to use the "Weight Transform" parameter. What you can basically do is apply a random effector to modify the weight transform first, then on the subsiquent effector that does the actual dropping of the clones into place you modify the weight parameter in teh falloff itself (or add a shapde falloff and move it through the objects), this will pass a random component from teh random effector to your other effector controlling when it starts to work (relative to it's falloff), creating a nice randomness while at the same time allowing you to have a very clamped shape.

The next method would be to actually have predefined places for your objects to fall to using the matrix object (i.e. you set it to clone on a flat surface or somesuch), then use the Inheritance effector, set the "Object" link to the Matrix Object and check the "Morph Motion Object" option. Now it'll blend between your original objects positions and the matrix objects positions (this also works great with a falloff if you use the "falloff based" option there, and also with the tip above yuo can create some really nice effects).

Those two should get you going for now.

Kokosing

01-29-2007, 09:57 AM

Thanks Per, the random weight trick was perfect for this. I'll give the other route a try when I've got a little more time.

Cheers,

W

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