• 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

Step effector

Like the Random effector the Step effector is one of the workhorses of MoGraph and I could imagine that it would be used a lot in text animations for television commercials.  What it does is apply a transformation to clones but the transformation is stepped.  e.g. a step effector with rotation of 100 degrees is applied to a linear grid of 10 clones.  The first clone is rotated 10 degrees, the 2nd 20 degrees and so on with the last clone rotated 100 degrees.  It's quite an easy effector to use and understand.  Things start getting interesting when you have more than 1 Step effector and or you play around with the spline graph.  By default the spline graph is linear but interesting results occur when you make the spline graph say bell shaped or even animate the shape of the spline graph.

The step gap option defines the number of clones per step.  e.g. say you have a 10 x 10 grid array of objects and the position offset is 100 in the Y axis, setting up a step gap of 19 makes 5 rows of 20 cubes with each row 20 units higher than the previous row.  I think this is a case where the count starts at 0 rather than 1.

This effector works well with the MoGraph text object and in this simple example there are 2 Step Effectors and both have linear falloff.  As the effectors move from left to right the letters and words are transformed in a stepped manner.  In addition to the transformations the effectors are also changing the colours of the text.