You want to do use particles to morph one word into another? You don’t want to mess with all of the Xpresso scripting to do it with Thinking Particles? Here comes the MoGraph module to the rescue! Using an Inheritance effector and a Randomize effector you can get this effect done quickly and easily.

Step 01
Start by creating the two Text objects you want to morph between.

Step 02
Create two MoGraph Cloner Objects with a Sphere (or whatever you want your particle to be) as children. Set the Mode for both Cloner Objects to Object.

Step 03
Drag in your Text Objects into the Target Object Link attribute of the two Cloner Objects.  By default this creates a clone at each of the vertexes of the target object.

Step 04
We want to get a more even, random distribution of clones throughout all of our text. Change the Mode of clone distribution to Volume.

Step 05
Now first, hide the Cloner Object that will be the target of your morph.  And select the Cloner Object that will be the source of the morph and create an Inheritance Effector.

Step 06
In the Attribute Manager for the Inheritance Effector, find the Effector tab.  In the Target Object Link attribute, drag in the Cloner Object that is the target of your morph.  When you do this nothing will happen, until you check Morph Motion Object.  You will notice that all of your clones “jump” to the position of your target cloner object.

Step 07
Stay in the Attribute Manager for the Inheritance Effector, Effector tab. Animate the Strength slider from 0% to 100% over 20 to 60 frames.  You can play the animation and now see your morph working correctly.

Step 08
To get our particles to spread out a little more during the middle of the morph we’ll add a Randomize Effector.  Select your source Cloner Object and create a Random Effector.

Step 09
We only want the Random Effector to move everything around during the middle of our morph.  So set it’s Strength to 0% on the same two frames you set keys for the Inheritance Effector.  Then, halfway between those two keyframes, set a keyframe for Strength 100%.  You can tweak the timing of this however you like.

FINISHED
You should have something that looks similar to this…

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Filed under: Tutorials, 3D, C4d, cloner object, effector, inheritance effector, MoGraph, Tutorial