Random Color Cycling on Moving Clones

#1

What I’m trying to achieve is a little complicated, but essentially I have clones that are moving along a formula spline and I’m wanting each clone to not only have a random color, but also have that color change over time, independent of the clone’s position.

In the example I have attached below, I’ve managed to achieve all of these things except for making each clone’s color change with time. I had considered using a Shader effector with noise, but when I do this, the color of the clones seem to change based on the clone’s position instead of based on time; this is not desirable because it either means that the colors will change too fast (if the noise scale is too small) OR the clones within a close proximity will all be the same color (if the noise scale is large).

I’m wanting these moving clones to all have their colors change independently (imagine each clone’s color starting at a random offset on a gradient wheel and then cycling through that gradient at a given rate). How can I do this?

example2.c4d (210.0 KB)

#3

John,

Try changing the random mode in your Random Colors effector to Turbulence or Noise, that will cycle through your Colorizer gradient.

#4

Unfortunately, that seems to have the equivalent effect of what I mentioned above; the colors change too fast, or if the scale is large enough, all of the clones next to each other all have the same color. I want to be able to control the rate at which they change while also having the clones’ colors be independent of each other.

#5

I managed to achieve what I was looking for by removing the RandomColor effector and instead using a formula effector with the following formula:

sin(360*rnd(count; id)+360*4*t/28)

(with color mode set to “On” and “Use Alpha/Strength” unchecked). Although it technically isn’t “cycling” through the gradient (it’s going back and forth along it), this was close enough for my purposes.

#6

As a side-note, you could check out my Tutorial on Youtube, and although it doesn’t solve your problem specifically, it will definitely give you some more ideas on how to colorize clones.