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MoGraph
3. Target Effector
In this tutorial we will show you how to achieve fantastic results with just a few clicks of the mouse. MoGraph
has been designed to quickly master tasks that, until now, either took hours to complete or simply were not
possible.
For example, the Target Effector: How would you animate 1 000 clones that follow a target object without the
use of MoGraph? Well, we won’t waste any time trying to answer that question. Instead, we will show you how
easily it can be done using MoGraph.
We will require the following items for our scene:
• Cloner object
• Target Object (a simple parametric object)
• Target Effector
• Primitive (the object to be cloned)
All we need for this tutorial is these four simple items – MoGraph will do the rest. All you have to do is be
creative (as you surely always are...).
Create a Cloner object (main menu: MoGraph/Cloner) and a cube (main menu: Create/Object/Cube).
The cube will serve as the object to be cloned and will be made a child of the MoGraph Cloner object in the
Object Manager. Before this happens, though, the cube has to be resized. Set the size of the cube in the
Attribute Manager at the bottom right to: X = 4 cm; Y = 1 cm; Z = 4 cm. Once the cube has been rescaled
you may have to zoom in to the cube a little to get a better view of your scene. In the Object Manager drag
the Cube object onto the MoGraph Cloner object. This will make the cube a child of the Cloner object and
simultaneously tell the Cloner object to affect the cube.
If you didn’t zoom in too far you will see that two additional cubes have been created (you may have to adjust
your editor window to see the cubes). These cubes are located above the original cube, with relatively large
intervals between them. This interval represents the default interval the Cloner Object applies. Since we will
be creating a surface comprised of many cubes we will now adjust the Cloner object’s settings accordingly.
Select the Cloner object in the Object Manager and take a look at its editable settings in the Attribute Manager
below. You will see that the Cloner object’s Y-value is set to 50 m, but we need our clone to move in the Z and
X directions. Set Mode from Linear to Grid Array at the top of the Attribute Manager. The clones will now be
arranged into a cube. To flatten our arrangement of clones we will now set the Count’s Y-value to 1. Your scene
should now look like this: