Close Dr. Sassi, but not quite, and I appreciate your attempt! My winding colorful path is not part of the cloner. The cloner has one child (a cube), mode:Object, distribution: surface, and the surface object is a plane with some subdivision surfacing to make the plane look hilly. The clones begin to appear as a plain efffector's linear field sweeps over it, "growing" the cubes from a scale of -1 to 0. It seems like the variation shader in the winding path's material takes into account the sum total of all objects in the scene when it calculates the random seed. That's the only thing I can think of. I'm not keyframing anything int he variation shader itself, and the "flickering" of colors in the path only occur within the field's animation timespan.

I have a winding pathway (an editable cube with many polygons) with the variation shader set so each of its polygons have a different color. Along either side of this pathway, I'm growing cloned cubes by means of an animated linear field. The problem is that while the field animates (growing the cubes from scale -1 to 0), polygons in the pathway change colors as if its variation shader random seed has been keyframed, but it hasn't. Is there a way to prevent this?

thanks,

• Mike

You're welcome Dr. Sassi. I didn't avoid the boole, I just made it larger to accomodate all of the clones. What I noticed was that clones were changing color, but only when another clone moved to within the previously smaller sized boole. My guess is that it was throwing off the clone indexs somehow.

• Mike

Hi Dr. Sassi, thank you for your response, as always. You've been very helpful to me and I appreciate it. I think I solved this issue. The culprit is the Boole that the clones are sitting in. I have an array arranged as a grid, and the clones are spread out along the z-axis. All of the clones are then flattened down to the same z-position. When they're coming together, they're "trimmed" to within a volume in a Boole. What I noticed was that some of the clones originally reside outside of the Boole volume, so each time one of these clones entered into the Boole, that indexed clone color would change. I tested this without the clone being in a Boole and there wasn't any flickering. Problem solved. Thanks again!

Hi. I have a cloner with a material containing the variation shader in the color channel. This cloner has one cube as its child, and has two effectors: a Hide Selection and Random. In both effectors' Parameter tab, Color mode is set to off. In the Random effector's Effector tab, I am animating Maximum and Minimum to create movement. The problem is that these cubes are changing colors until the animation completes. I want each of these cloned cubes to maintain one steady color from start to finish. I am not sure what's causing this. Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you!