Soft Selections with Mocca

Some of you may know of something called soft selections in other packages. These are basically falloffs based around your cursor, or sometimes falloffs based on a weightmap. Anyhow now i'm going to show you how ot do something like this using Mocca.

Start out by making a Plane object, make it about 700 by 700.
Make the plane editable (a soft selection wouldn't work on the mesh otherwise).
Add a Bone Deformer object into your scene
Parent the Bone to the Plane. Right click on the bone and select "Fix Bone" from the menu, the bone will now turn green to signify that it's been fixed in place and is switched on (and is ready to deform it's parent object).
With this bone selected, select the Claude Bonet paint tool. Start painting on your mesh to paint the soft selection.
When done move the bone around to move your "Soft Selection"
Once you're happy with the result, you can fix it by selecting the plane and choosing Functions->Current State to Object.

This is very much the same as the older technique of using Vertex Maps painted using the Selection Tool, and then putting a restriction tag on the deformer (works with any deformer) before deforming, except it takes out a stage (using a restriction tag) and the claude bonet tool build up to it's level more like an airbrush so it's slightly more fluid and easy to control. However if you're using V7, then vertex maps and restriction tags on your deformers is the only way to go.

Don't forget you can also use limit range with your bones to create another layer of falloff from them

This technique as a modelling technique is quite powerful, but tends to be a little slow for most purposes, but i find it pretty useful for creating quick landscapes

End of tip.