deck

I have the python plugin for index. Noseman does a tutorial about reordering clone indexes and having them radiate out from or follow a null, he uses a feature in the Voronoi fracture that's not in R18, dunno if its in your R20 but quite interesting. Weighting is something else to look into if you haven't already, very powerful and important part of mograph. Have fun Deck

Im running Catalina 10.15.7 on a 2015 MacBook. Been reluctant to install big Surr, what kind of name is that anyway. Deck

Not sure why its not working for you, if I load your file do the first few steps, centre etc create guides it starts to work, didn't got totes fold preview stuff but its starting to do its thing. I am in R18, maybe that's got something to do with it. My file below Deck raw 01.c4d

Inheritance is really useful. In this case I just transferred the scale, but you can transfer PSR too so it gives you the ability to move clones from one place to another and generally pretend to be another set of clones. Deck

Weighting is quite a big part of mograph and is really useful, in short its about giving each cone a different value, denoted by its color from red to yellow. You wouldn't notice a difference immediately but the weight will effect the performance of subsequent effectors. There are lots of tutorials about clone weighting out there so I won't try and explain quite a large subject here. Deck

After thinking about it you may be able to get it done with an inheritance effector. In the file below the blue clones are just there as offstage actors, you can move them out of the way or hide them in the render. So the blues are set up in the order you want and the plain effector passes thru with linear falloff and scales them up. playing with the distance between clones ( size of plane they are cloned on ) and the speed the plain effector travels you should be able to sort the timing. The red group are your actual performers and using an inheritance effector they inherit their scale from the blue ones and are cloned in random grid array. Another good way to lay clones out is to have a lot of single poly planes in a connect object, you can move these about and clone on the connect object which gives you the ability to drag clones around individually. great for lining them up for the effector in this case. Deck Inherit scale.c4d

the only way I can imagine doing that is using multiple effectors with mograph selections, so it would be a bit of a task creating each selection and effector and then key framing each effector to go live at the said intervals. Im far from expert but I dont think you will be able to do that with a single effector. There might be a tricksy way with the formula effector but that's not my bag. Deck

As I understand it its the same as the time parameter in the cloner. Its used when your clone has some animation attached to it. So if you had a pulsing animated sphere in your cloner, when you cloned it and pressed play all the clones would animate at once. In the cloner you would set this number to start the animation at that time ( offset ) it doesn't seem to do the same thing with the instance but you can still influence the offset with an effector, I've used random here and you only see it in the first few frames as the instances aren't looping. File below should play when you open it. Deck time offset 01.c4d

Heres an alternative but still imperfect method, tho it may cut out a few steps from above. so if you use mograph to clone an object onto every vertices of your text spline, then make a mograph selection of the points you wish to expand and invert that selection, go to mograhp menu and hide selected, this leaves just the clones on the points you wish to expand. Now you make another cloner with your spline extension in it, and clone it onto the previous cloner ( object mode for both cloners ) this puts your little spline sections in place, you can then go on to expand the cloner and join the splines together etc. Unfortunately the only way to join them properly that I could find was to select the two points that sit on top of each other and do a join segment command on each one. Having said all that I think you might do it just as fast with the spline pen and some sort of snapping/ quantise set up. Deck You can also control drag points to offset them. ignore the point selection on text, that's not required. Neon spline extend.c4d

If you start off in step one using rectangles instead of lines you can then cut them all in half at once using the knife tool and delete the points on one side. make sure close spline is unchecked. Deck

You can do that with a shader effector and the cloner in sort mode. takes a bit of fine tuning separating the colours, probably should have done it by the numbers, that will get trickier with more clones. Deck Clone sort by grayscale.c4d

seems to work if you go for flat mapping and add a stick texture tag. Deck grab and a file below fracker01.c4d

Try changing your "view clipping" in the project settings. Deck

I was learning about the switch node the other day and in one of the tutorials I watched a chap was using the switch to swap out hi and lores geometry via an instance in his set up. Not sure if you can adapt that technique to your needs but its quite simple to use, Im an xpresso beginner and managed it ok. Deck

Heres a version using the multi shader to switch between the same two video textures but one is set to start and finish as normal and the other not to start at all, I should have been able to swap them out with linear falloff but it went a bit weird, this version is using a tracer as falloff as mentioned previous. was a bit big so heres a dropbox link for it. Deck https://www.dropbox.com/t/1mnoLoBDx2Fqmwf7

Ive been trying to work out how to get video into my C4D and finally managed to sort that. I may have got ahead of myself re the last suggestion as although I think you could use the position of a null on a spline to fire off a single material ( I guess using a range mapper to convert the position on spline to a frame number to feed into the shader tab start frame ) you actually have lots of separate materials, so you would need to iterate thru each clone index and plug into each material that way. Thats all a bit advanced for my expresso knowledge but it does sound like the sort of thing that could be done. That would also be dependent on your clones being layed out in roughly order of index too, so more complex than it first appears I guess. Deck

Something wrong with my video situation as I cant seem to load any without a texture error. I did notice that you can set a start time for video to play, you could possibly drive that parameter with some xpresso linked to the current frame position or even a nulls position on some abstract spline that you could keyframe, or maybe even your current camera position. Just a thought. Deck

I don't know much about video textures, so the only method I can think of would be to create two clones, one with a still frame and the other with video and then swap them out with an effector, but in that scenario you would have to have each plane pair in its own cloner and then clone lots of those so impractical really. You might cheat it by setting up 1 entire cloner not to play, duplicate that entire thing and use the transform in cloner to just push it in front of the still version by the tiniest amount, you could then show and hide the second version with regular visibility in any of the effectors. problem then is that without linear falloff the video will disappear and reveal the still again when you move on. You may be able to get around that by using a different source for the visibility fall off. If for example your camera was targeting a null on a spline for its view direction and said spline was close enough to the planes, you could trace the same null and use the resulting spline as falloff for the visibility, thus it would finish playing whilst you were moving on. That all sounds pretty clumsy really and maybe there is a button or trick somewhere that just says play and a smarter member can reveal it to us both. Im probably overthinking it. Deck

Your welcome, I was a bit worried when I opened your file and found I couldn't repeat it, I had the same error as you. Must have stumbled into it earlier. Deck

Im still on R18 so maybe a test from someone on R23 would be useful................... Aha ( maybe ) just looked at your file again and I was having the same trouble, weirdly the only thing that seems to make it work is to change your display to Gourad or quick shading in the top view, seems as soon as there is a surface visible it seems to work. Thats a weird one, I suppose it is trying to project onto a surface rather than wires !?!?!? Deck

Seems to work ok for me, do the painting in the top view and it seems fine. Obviously the spline needs to be over the top of the landscape which it isn't at the moment. Deck

I thought you were animating the roof size but if not you can just do a regular edge to spline command and use that. Only need the plugin if animating as I believe it keeps it all live. Deck Mograph Cloner_scale towards edges2.c4d

Any use for nosemans, edge to spline plugin, I cant use it in R18 but maybe you could use the generated spline in your falloff. Deck

Not sure you can get round the planes extending to infinity, I was playing with fractures in centre of objects a while back and I ended up using a duplicate and hiding the opposite parts, then I was able to use effectors on the copy with just the visible parts I wanted. Clonky but a work around. Depending on what your doing you may be able to get by with the falloff on any effectors you may use. Im on R18 and I know the Moroni has more options in later versions so there may be a more elegant answer. eg file below Deck Voronoi_Issue hide.c4d

you can still drop them all in a cloner with a set number and use effectors, or drop them into a fracture object and do the same. Deck