• 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

Manual and Tutorials

MoGraph comes with a 152 page pdf manual for release 9.6. This explains every MoGraph object and the various parameters and options. Maxon has done a pretty good job with the manual but because MoGraph is completely new I found I needed to keep chipping away at the manual or pick a particular MoGraph object and work through the manual and just that object experimenting what the various options do. In release 10 the manual has been replaced by an interactive help file which is essentially the pdf manual but in an html based help format. I know some people will miss the pdf manual but I found finding the manual section for whatever I wanted was much quicker. Just hover the mouse over the relavent MoGraph object or whatever and press Ctrl + F1 and up pops the section in the help file. Very slick.

Included on one of the CD's are 7 Video tutorials and accompanying scene files. After the excellent HAIR video tutorials I had high expectations for the MoGraph video tutorials. Although these are quite good, I was hoping for some in depth and advanced tutorials that really show you how to push MoGraph to the limit. However the final Sound Effector / Disco Light tutorial is very good and an example of what there should have been more of.

The tutorials are very short and more of a "Do this, do that" type of tutorial rather than explaining things. Essentially you are supplied with a start scene and you add the MoGraph objects and do some animating by following the videos. Despite this they are still very useful but as mentioned I would have liked to have seen the inclusion of some advanced and longer tutorials. I expect Maxon will pick up some new CINEMA 4D customers because of MoGraph and some in depth and thorough video tutorials would have been really beneficial. No doubt C4D Cafe will help out here!!

The videos are in Quick time format and a bit hard to see as the size is 640 x 447. I can’t think of any reason for this small size since the tutorials come on the DVD and there’s plenty of space for higher resolution versions. The audio is a bit distorted or mushy in the videos but still easy to understand.

Here's a summary of the tutorials and then resulting animation that the reviewers produced after following the tutorials:

Tutorial 1 - Sun Valley - 3min 20sec

Tutorial 2 - Multishader - 3min 20sec

Interesting in this tutorial is that you can’t see the effect of the multishader until you render. In the viewport the cards are all shown the same colour.

Tutorial 3 -Instance Object - 5min 52sec

Tutorial 4 -Cloner Object - 3min 20sec

Tutorial 5 -Fracture Object - 4min 54sec

Tutorial 6 -Matrix Object - 2min 27sec

Tutorial 7 -Sound Effector / Disco Lights - 6min 42sec

One oversight in this tutorial was that they forgot to tell you how to render out the sound. Possible in CINEMA 4D if you familiar with how sound is rendered out but not so obvious for beginners. Or you can use an external application to combine the 6 audio tracks as I did. After that you still have to combine the video with the audio in an external application.