Creating dust particles using Maya Mash Network for Toolbag 3 - Part 1

in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to make floating particles for tool bag for a lighting environment and we're gonna use Maya and the mash toolset to generate those particles to get the the effect of floating dust or particles in the scene and you can see the lighting setup that I have here something that has moonlight with some volumetric light coming into the scene and it everything's dialed in inside the tool bag and now we just have to go and generate the particles inside of Maya to bring it so let's open up Maya and inside of Maya I have the scene kind of in its raw state model out and what we're gonna do is use this for to figure out how big our particle feel that we're gonna make is going to be so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kind of zoom back out a little bit you can see the outer bounding box the light blocker that we're using for tool bag is what this is right here and we're just gonna generate the particle system kind of outside and then we'll move it in once we start dialing it in so to get something started we're gonna start with a plane so I'm gonna come up to poly modeling plane and it should drop the polygons and onto the grid here you can see it right here I'm gonna do F key to frame up on it and this is way too much geometry we want to keep it low poly because we're gonna generate a lot of floating particles so let's go to the attribute or the channel box go to the inputs and the plane attributes here in the history so go to the inputs and I'll just set this the subdivisions the width and the height to two and that should be good enough for what we need and then I'm gonna start rounding out the corners here so I'm gonna go to vertex mode and then select the corners and then a scale tool and just kind of round it out right there so this is really good this will keep the poly count real low and still give us the shape that we want and I'm gonna go back to object mode and I'm gonna duplicate this and I'm gonna rotate and hold the J key and I'm gonna just kind of incrementally move it so it's standing straight up so we've got you know one going down across the Y the X and then we want the one to go to in the Z direction so we'll duplicate it again hold the J key and then rotate it and there we go so again this is all you V diff you want to actually want to make a transparent pink texture it's actually texture a simple white dot it's for your particle you could do that but for art purposes this simple geometric object is going to give us really good angles from every side that this is a spherical dust particle all right so once we've done this we're going to select all three of them and then we're going to shift and right click and really it's going to kick combined or you can go up to the top and go to mash and combine up here and then that's gonna come in here combine all this is the one object we're gonna delete the history on that and I'm gonna rename this dust one alright so that's just our first dust particle right here and again it's all UV if you need it to UV it now what we're gonna do is add a new shader to it so I'm gonna right click on it say new material and I'm just gonna do a simple Lambert and this Lambert I'm gonna name it dust shader so when we export this out as an FBX or Olympic cash file it's already got a shader associated with it which will make it really handy so that's what we're gonna do here alright that looks good I will add a little bit of a hint of blue to it just to help see it a little bit better in the scene as we generate the particle field alright I'm gonna select this object and I'm gonna go and use the mash tool set so to find it sometimes it's so long the top here but you do have to go to a different tool set inside of Maya so if I go over to where the top left corner here go to modeling and go to VFX and once we go to effects we'll change the menu set we want to use the mash so we're gonna go up in here select mash make sure your piece of geometry is selected and then say create mash Network and then this will start creating a waiter node which right here you can see and this waiter node has all the different things that you can do with the mash Network it also creates a mass distribution node which basically as you can see distributes the amount of instances of the geometry that I first created so right now a number of points I have set to 10 I can increase this to more I can even change the distribution type to radial or spherical and I can even attach it to a mesh but what I want is going to be grid and in this grid I'm gonna set some parameters again these are all based off the Maya units and inside these sliders so what you want to do is you want to go to the distance node here you know this is a very large scene you can see this is quite big so we need to use some big numbers and again this will vary depending on the scene you have and how big these numbers do to be so for me I'm just gonna already kind of went through and set some numbers fear for me so let's see if this is a good starting point you can kind of see it sitting out here but I need more so what I'm gonna do is I want to go back through that mass distribution and I'm gonna come over here and go to the grid XY and Z in here I'm gonna increase those numbers to about seven for the X 7 for the Y and then 7 for the Z there we go now you can really see that particle field that we generated that looks pretty good I could I mean on the Y could come just a little bit smaller but one fitty or two fitty and then maybe a little bit bigger on the Z that looks pretty good there and then the X will do another 500 there we go okay so now it's built this you know nice grid pattern as you can see of particles now we need to randomize this particle field so what we're gonna do is going to go back to the waiter node so right here mash 1 we're gonna come in here and there's lots of different things you can play with you can play with some dynamics you can play with some Springs you can play with quite a bit of stuff in here and what I want to do is I want to do the random node so this is just gonna randomize give us control on randomizing the position rotation and scale so I'm gonna click on it and it's going to give me well many would say add random node now let's start randomizing these particles I'm just gonna zoom in a little bit more so we can actually see what we're doing here and I can randomize the x y&z position so that's doing pretty good but it's not enough I can still see kind of that grid pattern in there so we have to overdrive it so I'm gonna go to like the Z and let's just overdrive this by let's do 50 that looks a lot better already now let's do like 20 for the Y and and next looks pretty good yeah I like that so sometimes you have to overdrive these values and then the other thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to zoom in on one of these guys there we go and I'm randomized the rotation for these objects and then I can randomize the scale a little bit but if I do each X Y & Z kind of elongates the particle what I want to do is I wanted to scale uniformly across all three axes so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn on uniform scale right here at the bottom and it basically kind of disables the Y and the Z only the X is now something that can use it you can see I can randomize the scale of the particles so some are getting bigger and some are getting smaller and somewhere in the middle just like that that looks pretty good alright so I've got in there and I've randomised my particle field with the scale rotation and position looks good now let's add some movement to this field here so I'm gonna go back to the waiter node so I'm gonna hit the mash one and I'm gonna use the signal node and again this is this gonna use a procedural noise to actually generate movement for our particles so I'm just gonna right click on that left click on that and just go add signal and by default it adds a for denote noise and if I go down to my time slider I want to make sure I'm at 200 frames here I'm gonna hit the play and you can see if I hit play it's kind of making the particles go up and down and again that's using a procedural noise to do that so what we can do is we can play with that a little bit more so I'm gonna go through and play with the position X and the position Y and give it a little bit more movement I can I think we can overdrive these so if I do 50 yeah I see that I wanted to move a little bit more on the Y going up and down so let's do 50 on that there we go let's do less on the X so I'll change that to like 15 maybe so it's going there going up and down more that's looking pretty good and then I can randomize a little bit the rotations that's going pretty good and then I can play with the down here I can play with the some other settings I can play with scale which is gonna randomize the scale if I want but I don't want to do that too much what I do want to do is I want to see and play with different signal types so right now it's doing the 40 let's do looping noise that goes really slow let's play with the functional browny motion that's kind of cool and then there's the trigonometry which is basically almost going in like a huge loop circling but I kind of like it it's kind of cool it's a good movement there now I can come down to the trigonometry settings and play with the step amount I can play with the scale of the noise and then the time I can slow it down so this time scale I can make it crawl or speed it up depending on how I want it so I want it relatively go pretty slow that's that's looking pretty good I like that again you don't have to have it exactly in my settings you can go in there and change it up let's go just a little slower there we go yeah looking good looking good all right so I've added some movement to my particles now it's time to actually start getting this geometry or this particle filled into actual geometry to actually bring into tool back because right now these are just instances in the mash network inside of Maya this is not true geometry at the moment so I'm gonna hit stop and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make sure I have this object selected so it's gonna be the mash repo mesh right here in the outliner I'm gonna come up to mash up here at the top I'm gonna go to utilities I'm gonna rip this menu off so I'm gonna click on the top here and what I want to do is I want to go to this bottom section of the menu here and by doing this I'm going to switch the mash Network to geometry type so I'm gonna hit this and it's gonna ask me for the mash later note so I gotta make sure I select this in the outliner right here I'll select that and then I'll go to switch mash to generate route so this is gonna turn it into geometry so now let's just switched it to geometry and actually made an instant sir so it's still not objects it's an instant sir it's so it's it's it's one step closer the other thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna rename this I'm gonna call this dust so that instance are in the outliner I'm just gonna name this dust one or I think I called the other one best one this all called custom dust underscore that's what I call it there we go in the next video I'm going to show you how to start baking out your particle animation

Channel: Frank Pereira

Views: 13,250

Rating: 4.9484978 out of 5

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Id: 4-G_5VSWJQo

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 07 2018