#3DQuickTips 007 - Maya - Procedural Chain in MASH

you hi guys yawn here in the 3d quick tip video I will show you how to create a chain in Maya it used to be pretty tricky but right now with the mesh integration since Maya 2016 is pretty simple and we can do it in a fully procedural way which is quite fancy today right so what start let me create a new scene and we'll start from scratch first of all just be sure that you have a mesh loaded into your Maya so if you go to plugins and third for mesh just enable DS so you can be sure that you have everything loaded and switch modeling to effects and it will add the menu in here and you also have a shelf now let's start with a very simple chain link which will be based on Taurus let's make it 8 by 8 subdivision so it will be pretty light at the end but just notice that I'm moving the components instead of an object in that case the pivot will stay in the origin which will be crucial at the end but we will get to it soon so what's just know that GX is connect T's connect these lets me connect stretch over there just to let you know I'm often using marking menus just shift and right-click for the different tools or control and command right click for converting selection or splitting edge rings and stuff like so this is our simple chain link I think that that's enough we don't need anything fancy for now let me just open the edges it's a good idea to make a UVs for that right now because as we will duplicate it several times we will already have movies for all the pieces already prepared and once you are duplicating something it's always better to make the Ubese first because if you don't do that you will end up with duplicating a UVs onto multiple pieces or whatsoever so it's always great idea to start with a UVs with a single object okay so we have a chain link which is awesome chain link and we need a curve to duplicate our chaining on so let's make simple curve let's modify it a bit so we have a like bit more dimensions more stuff happening okay we hide the grid so we see what's going on the chain against now a bit too big so what scale it down a bit just notice that I'm doing everything on component the in that case my weight transforms will will stay the same okay and right now it's time to make the chain so let's start with a chain itself select the link and create a mesh network and I'll also open the mesh editor so we know what's actually going on mesh is creating points and duplicating or instancing an object on those points we cannot see those points right now but doesn't matter you can just imagine that there is one point second point third point fourth etc and we can later on swap the object to something else or add more objects to be duplicated but that I will show you later let's start let's select the first node we have which is the distribution and you can see that we have number of points we have offset and we warm the every second or every other to be rotated 90 degrees we cannot do in here in a distribute if we do that to be they rotate everything rotates right now you can try to twist it or whatever but it's not to twist it more than 360 it's something what resembles the chain but it's not a procedure the properly procedural way so we will do it procedure as we should so let's make number of points just one and we will add a node called replicator which will give us a bit more options let's say we do like ten replicants right now and you can see that there is also an offset but it doesn't matter for now let's just make it roughly like this because later on we will distribute it along the curve but what replicator allows us is to do the pattern and in the pattern it says every second and we want every second to be rotated 90 degrees so this is kind of a better procedural way right we can add a little bit more stuff in here but it's not necessary for for our chain link and we can add the curve right now so let's add the curve on top and we have our curve and middle mouse button and drag it to the list over here and you can see that our chain is starting to be distributed along the curve however it's not following the curve hundred percent and that because let me turn that off in here that's because we already set an offset position in the replicator what we want to do is to zero it out and add lie I don't know for now we can add like 50 chain links and all of those are stacked on top of each other right now and if you turn on the curve you can see that they are now following the curve as they should let me just tweak a few settings in here because that's obviously wrong so let's change the animation speed to zero because there is obviously no animation and let's put the steps to one which means that it will start at the start of the curve and go all the way to the end we can also ignore the step which is similar thing but with this we can we can animate that style let's add few more to fill in our curve let's say that's almost there like to USand 5 our orientation is is definitely wrong and rotated 90 degrees what we can do is add the transform mode in here and play with that but that doesn't work 100% don't ask me why it's I I haven't found out why to what I usually do is start to rotate the vertices until I hit the correct axis and there is also another issue that's sometimes that curve just doesn't refresh I think it should be like this and let's also zero out the pattern because that confuses us a little bit right now you'll rotate it later okay so any right now we hit the sweet spot and you can see that our chain is properly oriented and now it's time so that this is right now correct and it's time to put the pattern rotation back and you can see that if even if I change something in here in here in here doesn't do anything it is just not refreshing this node so let's turn that curve off and rotate in the x-axis obviously let's turn the curve on and tada we have a chain and right now we can play a bit more with the settings on a curve because you can see that those right now that those are too close to each other what you can do is to change the step to go over one to split them a bit or we can change the number of replications so even less let's go for 200 ok that looks all right and right now we have a chain we can be like satisfied what we have and tada but the proper procedural ISM in this is that we can easily change the curve right now and everything follows you can make a different curve we can spread out if you if you change like the length of the curve you can see that obviously those links are are intersecting right now because we we made it longer so we need a bit more of them let's go for 250 however there is no the end right now it looks quite 2cg I would say and we can add a little bit of randomization where the node called random right now you can see that it's probably too random right what we want is actually a bit more random rotation in the y-axis it's probably the best we can add it in to all accesses just just a tiny bit we can also add it just just a tiny bit to the position and also the scale you choose a uniform scale otherwise our wings will be super weird and you can see that right now looks almost similar but there is a bit of a noise - - though some of them will be will be off but you can change the seat until low your hero ones or those which will be visible in short will be collected again or you just simply reduce that rotation a bit and you can see that the randomness quite helps but right now it's time to show you the true procedural power or match let's add another chain link let's make it zero - and let's add some some detail to it I will I'll do some very sloppy modeling like sorry about ever very sloppy modeling but it will be fast and it will do so we have two chain links right now let me return that to its origin and what we can do is decide the mesh select this icon which is the repro and it has the object which is duplicated right now if we middle drag and drop our second chain link nothing happens however if we middle drag and drop it on top it will be replaced that's pretty cool right so you can set up your chain or beads on a necklace for the character whatever and then just play with the object you can make proxy with super simple meshes and swoop that in here you can also you can even make a proxies in here so what we want to do is actually make every third one the spiked one you can see that there are two IDs zero and one so what we need to do is to add an ID node you can see that every second one is spiked right now if we will raise the number you can see that every fourth is non spiked so that basically goes through the IDS and replicates that second one three times if we solid this again and swap these two you can see that our every fourth is spiked one so we can do whatever every nine every 14th well and as it is still procedural we can just edit this spike remove it from one side make it bigger on the other side well and it's still on top of the curves so we can still edit the shape of the curve or we can just simply make a sphere or what not go and go here remove that spiked one put a sphere in the air and we have spheres scale let's fear pit and what we can we have a necklace whatever you can play with tunt there are tons of other nodes in here you can play with these you can put like transform on top of this you can transform all of them it's like right now it's transforming all the points but if we will move it underneath curve it scaling just the object before it was distributed on the curve it's very very versatile - I hope you enjoyed it and you've that you found it interesting now I can see yeah this is pretty cool not bad right we are repeating like the non spiked fear spiked whatever play with this again I hope you found it interesting I would probably make a few more videos about how to use a mesh in assets how to create details for your models like wizards Gribble's whatever detailing procedural detailing because mesh is really powerful not just for motion graphics as it is meant to be but even for modeling be sure to subscribe to the channel so you won't miss those videos share them if you like and follow me on social media I'm posting all my work in progress stuff and updates see you soon guys you

Channel: Jan Jinda

Views: 25,492

Keywords: #3DQuickTips, 3DQuickTips, 3D, tip, modelling, cgi, vfx, quick, modeling, workflow, pipeline, visual effects, gamedev, game development, Maya, Autodesk, Autodesk Maya, speed, maya, procedural, procedural modelling, beginner, tutorial, education, guide, MASH, chain, curve, instance, 3d, tips, jan, jinda, jan jinda

Id: lIqZKh0lWkw

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019

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Procedural modelling in Maya? Why not, there's a lot of power hidden in MASH toolkit. In this video I'll show you how to make a simple chain with a full procedural control. Changing curve, link shapes, counts, orientation? No problem at all.