magnet and metaball

[breadbox]

was wondering if anyone could provide an answer as to why this happens.

when i have a metaball that is driving a magnet color & if i only set the color to the tx (red channel), I can still produce green and blue colors if i rotate the metaball.

when I rotate the metaball, even though that is "upstream" from the magnet , it changes the color of the magnet. I would assume that the magnet would strip off any values and just use the metaball as a field, and set the values to what is provided in the magnet node and it wouldn't matter which way it was rotated. I would guess in most cases you would not rotate a metaball but in my case I'm rotating it because I want to pivot the animation in a specific way. So my workaround is to invert the rotation transforms on the metaball before the pivot first then it goes into the rotation with pivot and that basically undo's any color change in the magnet while still rotating the metaball.

here is my test file.

MagnetTest_V3.hipnc

[edward]

If you enable "Affect Position" on the Magnet, you'll see that the point positions are changing because the direction of the translate value is changing. I think Affect Color just directly uses the position values. So that's why you're getting different colors. If you always want the same color, then you probably want to compute that by using the *length* of the position change instead. eg. perhaps just taking length($CR, $CG, $CB) ... But because the point positions are changing, the color will still change depending on the rotation.

MagnetTest_V3_KEEP_IT_BLUE.hipnc