Dynamic Cargo and Conveyor Belts
[Beginner-Intermediate] [Requires Mograph]
In this 3 Part tutorial we’ll explore some cool tricks on how to perfectly align the cubes with the conveyor, set up the dynamics to drop them precisely into the carriages, create dynamic conveyor belts to carry them to their next destination, and transform the white cubes into colorful spheres along the way! If you don’t have your own conveyor, you can download the Clean-Start file below.
Download “Conveyor_Clean Start.c4d”
Part 1 [29:09]
In Part 1 we’ll use a Pose Morph tag to easily adjust the width of our carriages. Then, with the help of Xpresso, we’ll explore a novel way of setting up the cargo cube cloner to perfectly align the cubes with the carriages of our conveyor. Lastly we’ll set up our dynamics so that each line of cargo cubes falls at a precise place and moment in time. If you don’t have your own conveyor, you can download the Clean-Start file at airbusch1.com.
So let’s get started!
Part 2 [33:53]
In Part 2 we’ll build our Dynamic Conveyor Belt using Polygon Objects and base the size of our belt off our Main Conveyor Spline so everything easily aligns. Once the initial belt is complete, we’ll use the incredibly handy Naming Tool to rename our belt so that our Xpresso Nodes have unique names when we copy the belt. There is also a short section on how to add “textures” individually to the Caps and Rounding of Extrude objects. But before we move on to Part 3, we have to change the Dynamics of our Cargo Cubes so that they “ride” the dynamic conveyor belt, then use a couple of keyframes to stop our cloner from Looping once our cubes have become dynamic.
Part 3 [26:24]
In Part 3 we’ll explore the amazing Mograph Effectors to change the color of our clones, and use the Mogragh Color Shader to utilize a texture that will allow us access to all the Material Channels. We’ll also look at how to generate more GI in the Illumination channel to achieve the effect in the Intro animation to this tutorial. Then it’s time to transform our Cubes into Spheres with the help of the Spherify Deformer and the Clones setting within the Mograph Cloner. We’ll also examine the little “gotcha” of where to place the Effectors for the Dynamic Clones in order to precisely gauge where the transformation from “Cube to Sphere” takes place.
