• Introduction
• Cloner object
• Effectors - Overview
• Group effector
• Delay effector
• Formula effector
• Inheritance effector
• Random effector
• Shader effector
• Sound effector
• Spline effector
• Step effector
• Target effector
• Time effector
• Linear Clone Tool, Radial Clone Tool & Grid Clone Tool
• Matrix object
• Fracture object
• Instance object
• Text object
• Tracer
• Spline mask
• Displace Deformer
• Extrude deformer
• Spline wrap
• Cache tag / Baking animations
• MoGraph shaders
• Manual and Tutorials
• Goodies / Samples Scenes Etc
• XPresso for MoGraph
• Release 10 and MoGraph
• Conclusion

Extrude deformer

This deformer extrudes polygons and because the extrusion is with a deformer the extruded parts are live and can be altered and / or animated. A regular question in forums is "How do I animated a Matrix extrude?" so this new deformer fits the bill nicely. To restrict the polygons to be extruded you must define a polygon selection and drag and drop this into the selection field on the deformer. Or if the object is parametric (not made editable) the extrusion is applied to the entire object. It's then a matter of adjusting the deformer's parameters for what you want.

There are 2 transform modes:

From root - This allows you to use a spline (referred to as a Sweep spline) to define the extrusion. If you don't use a spline then the "from root" mode behaves the same as the "Per step" mode. The 9.6 MoGraph manual appears to have an error with regard to the Sweep spline. It says this setting is only available in the "Per step" mode. In fact it's the other way around and only available in the from "root mode". In this mode the spline points can be animated and this is applied to all of the extrusions.

Per Step - In this mode rather than using a spline you use position, scale and rotation parameters just like as though you were using the matrix extrude tool.

But the Extrude deformer goes beyond just being able to do the equivalent of an animated matrix extrude, you can also use MoGraph effectors to further modify your object. Note: As I found out and the manual confirmed, only position, rotation and scale transformations will work with this deformer. I had been trying to use the effector colour options to colour my extrusions and scratching my head why it wasn't working.

Here's an example of using the Extrude deformer on a plane object and the random effector. I've used a bit of simple XPresso so that as the effector nears the plane, the number of extrusion steps increases. The random effector has spherical fall off and is animated moving across the plane.

One enhancement that I would like to see is to have a "Preserve groups" option similar to the extrude tool. Currently a group of polygons are extruded separately just like how the Matrix extrude tool behaves. A work around is to melt the selected polygons into 1 N-gon and make that N-gon into a selection.