• 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

Shader effector

The Shader effector is obviously all about shading / colouring clones and objects. It can also be used to control the colour of lights. Before we move on to explain it a bit more, it's worth mentioning that the Shader effector is very useful on its own without applying any shading effects. In addition to the shader / colour options the effector can be used as a simple transformation effector. e.g. give the shader a fall off type other than infinite, then as it moves over clones the clones can be transformed with position, scale or rotation. I found myself regularly using the Shader effector for just this purpose.

Getting back to the review. The Shader effector is pretty straight forward to use. You define a colour / shader on the shader tab in the same way as you create colours and shaders. An alternative is to create a material and apply it to any object so that a texture tag is created. Next you drag and drop the texture tag into the texture tag field on the Shader effector's shading tab. You then select the specific channel from the texture tag that you want to use. The reason for using a tag is so that you can use the texture axis tools and projection modes. e.g. you want to apply an image as a texture to the clones. In practice you would probably first apply the material to the cloner object and use the texture axis tool to set up the material. Following that you would likely move the tag on to the shader effector or a null object before dragging it into the tag field on the effector.

When you do enable postion, scale or rotation transformations then the colour, shader or texture map is used to control these transformations. Even an animated texture can be used. The clones or matrix object nodes or particles are then transformed depending on the brightness of the colour. I think here that colours are desaturated into gray scales and this grayscale value bewteen 0% and 100% is used to determine the amount of transformation.

Here's a sample animation using the Shader effector. There are 4 shader effectors applied to a circular grid array of cubes. 2 of the materials are animated. One is the fire shader and the other is the MoGraph Beat shader. There's various fall off types and the effectors are all placed under a null that is animated to rotate. The arrow is a spline used to define the falloff. A delay effector has been added with a mild strength just to make the transitions smoother.