[Robsoyo]

Hi there, can someone please help me with this?

Im creating an animation for a nightclub, I had the idea of animating many speaker cones floating about, all vibrating to the bass. Ive modelled the cone and its surround then used endomorphs to get the fully extended cone (see images).

Now the morph mixer works great, when animated it really looks like the cone is vibrating. What I need to know is how to clone the speaker many times and have just the one morph mixer control them all, all i've managed to do is have a seperate morph mixer for each speaker, which is too much work!
There must be a way to do this???

Help very much appreciated!

[Robsoyo]

extended cone

[Mark]

Hmm.. don't know if this would work, but you could try generating particles and then replacing the particle objects with copies of the speaker. Don't know if this would respect the motion animation or not though - plus you'll lose the control over placement.

Another option would be to look at the plugin hdinstance (http://www.happy-digital.com/instance.asp) that might do what you need (if you're using LW9 however, check first whether it is compatible - I've heard rumours that it crashes in 9)

[TowerFan]

Another way that might work...

If you can munipulate the cone with a bone then you could use Follower, or even just parent all other cones to a parent cone bone. The hard part might be deforming the material between the cone and speaker frame. Probably need some creative weight mapping...

[rwhunt99]

I haven't tried this, but perhaps you can creat a MDD file, then just add it to every instance.

[Robsoyo]

Originally posted by rwhunt99 I haven't tried this, but perhaps you can creat a MDD file, then just add it to every instance.

Sorry, I don't know what a MDD file is, could you tell me a little about that?

The HD Instance plugin looks like it would work, I just can't afford it, anyone know of any free plugins that do the same?
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Im having another problem with another animation at the moment also. Im animating all these different shapes flying towards the camera one after the other then flying back a little more to settle to create a much larger shape. As the blocks fly toward the screen ive animated the colour to merge from black to red then back again, done this with the graph editor next to the colour tab in surface editor. So the colour should (ofcourse) change when it flies toward the camera.

The problem i'm having is everytiime I close LW down then reopen the next time, (even when I have saved) the merging from black-red-black on every object goes out of sync'! There's about 52 objects so its pretty annoying and time consuming putting them right again and agian!.

I think the problem is that the objects listed are not in order (see image), would i be right? I don't know how they came to be in that order in the first place but How do I change them into the right order? must be a way?

Hope someone can help

Many thanks

[rwhunt99]

Actually, I was doing some research and I think the actual plugin to use is Meta_Plug_Morph. I have discovered it is a legacy plugin which means that you can use it for older scenes that were created in an older version. But, you need to add Meta_Plug first which is why this might not be the answer. Check in the help files in Layout>object Properties>Motion designer plugins. sorry I couldn't be of more help.


That other problem, I am not sure what you are doing, but it looks like you should use a particle emitter and you can attach objects to the particles. You can envelope the color channel of the surface to change the colors over time. I hope that makes sense to you. I believe it will make management a bit easier and you can still control the paths of the particles also