Maya 2017 - Intro to MASH

okay so welcome to another new tutorial in Maya as promised this is going to be a special tutorial burr is about mash a new feature inside of Maya 2017 and mash is a tool that's mostly designed for the making motion graphics but it's a fantastic way of creating a procedural animations set-dressing and very cool funky effects inside of Maya I'm in no ways an expert on mash I've been playing around with it a little bit like most people have been over the last couple of weeks since my 20:17 came out and actually I'm quite enjoying it it's quite a fun little tool and I'm going to be showing you guys today a little bit of how to use mash for creating a little bit of animation and set dressing as well today so the first thing that we need to do is that we need to have some assets in order to start creating things inside of mash and I'm going to be making a very small 3d scene that I'm going to render out using Arnold that hopefully should look something like this so it's important when you're working with any of the dynamic systems inside of Maya that you consider making something that is slightly small and sweet I've got quite large scale inside of my scene where each one of these little grid squares is actually a meter by a meter and I'm going to start off by making a very kind of like simple type of terrain I'm going to build myself a little polygon plane by going into the polygon shelf over here and I'm just going to scale this up a little bit and I'm going to move it around in my viewport until I've got a plane that is roughly the size of a meter kind of like des there we go fill bit bigger a little bit smaller that's perfectly fine now this has come in with a few subdivisions already so it's 10 by 10 if I look inside the input inside of my poly plane and I'm just going to turn these subdivision widths down to 8 on each axis by selecting them here and just change subdivisions to eight I don't really need a lot but to do a little bit of modeling just before we start I'm going to make sure that I have the modeling tools available to me or I will right click on my view select edge mode over here and what I will do we go edge mode and I will double click an edge like this to do a loop selection and then what I'm going to do is double click on the icon here for the move tool because I want to introduce you guys to a new little section over here which is called soft selection now soft selection is very handy because what it does is that it allows me to create a little fall-off over here this is kind of like a heat signature for the edges that have been selected and if I use soft selection as I drag this edge up you'll see that it drags all the edges around it which are inside this heat area along with it if I don't have soft selection well I'm pretty much moving one loop at a time so it's all select is a really cool way for just being able to grab edges like this do a little bit of a slope like this I can grab myself again a little bit like this and do a little depression as well and this can work in vertices face mode whatever you want you can design very quickly just something that looks like a little bit of a hilly terrain like this I will just come over here move this down like that do a little bit of a bump like that and that's all the modeling I need for my environment again a very very very simple polygon plane just moved around quickly using soft select and the most important thing about soft select is always remember to turn it off because later on when you try select other things it's going to come back and basically you're going to be dragging things and they're going to be stretching like this so first of all that's the first thing that I am going to model just this little terrain over here and the next thing that I'm going to do is that I want to build some blades of grass that will go all across this plane very much the same way that we can do this with mash and other types of systems inside of Maya so I'm going to grab myself and I'm going to make a blade of grass out of a little box and use a box in a plane because mash actually likes things to kind of like be textured on all edges as well so be careful you might run into some normals problems and one little thing that I'm going to do is that I'm just going to move this up before I modify it by 0.5 I don't have any interactive creation turned on to this it's just a little tiny cube that sits on the polygon plane over here this is kind of important because just make sure that your mash out checks are actually built kind of like above the ground plane like this and after that's done I'm going to use the scale tool just to make it a little bit wider should be kind of like fairly thin like that and I'll right click on it to select the top face over here and I will move this upwards like so I'm just going to do kind of like you know some thin kind of like savanna type grass over here not kind of like the grass that you have at home so I'm going to kind of like going to be this kind of like tall thin thing over here just a little bit of the taper like that and when to pointy at the end as we were scared of right there we go it's just going to be something that looks just like this very low resolution grass now I'm going to go back to edge mode and I'm going to use one of the polygon modeling tools as well if you need a refresh on the polygon modeling tools we do have a few tutorials on the channel covering lots and lots and lots of things about this and what I'm going to do is use the connect tool and I am going to add in five subdivisions over here so I'm going to type five in these segments panel down here and I'm going to press ENTER on my keyboard to confirm this so when I click on any of the selection tools you will see that we have ourselves a wonderful set of subdivisions like this okay so next what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to object mode over here select this up like this and I'm going to add a little modifier inside of here because mash actually allows you to animate things and take objects that have animations on them and loop them and cycle them so I'm going to use that to make a little bit of animation on this object which will be copied to multiple blades of grass all across my scene so what I'm going to do is select my object I'm going to change my tool set up here in the drop down menu to the animation toolset and inside the animation toolset I'm going to scroll over to look for deform I'm going to look for a bend deformer inside this non-linear section over here so I'm going to hit nonlinear Bend and that's going to create a de forma inside of here which I should be able to see the properties for it inside of the channel box if I click on the bend property here you'll see that there's various options over here and if I just select a property called curvature and I start bending it you can start seeing that there actually is this little line over here if I change the wireframe just for a second you'll see that there's actually a spline that runs all the way through this little blade of grass like this and this is what's allowing me to deform my mesh because my mesh is following that little deform spline that is there now this is very handy because I've just added a little bit of curvature over here but I'm now going to change the areas that are affected by this deform and I can do that very simply by choosing the low bound the bottom part of the deform or mesh and I'm going to move that upwards to zero over here and once it's here down set to zero and then I'm going to take the high bound and I'm going to make it a little bit longer so it kind of like projects out of the top of the blade of grass like that the nice thing about the former's is that there are actual objects inside of Maya so you can actually move them around to position them a little bit better I'm just going into the move tool selecting the deform er by mudar selecting it in the viewport or just highlighting it like that I'm going to move it down like this so the bottom of the blade of grass is actually like this and then we can see this curve over here if there's a little bit of it coming out of top that doesn't matter it's not going to be rendered or anything like that and there we go we have ourselves a very kind of like sharp low poly version of a blade of grass like this now to make this look a little bit more grass like one of the things that we can do is we can add a texture to it and I'm specifically going to add an Arnold shader to it because at the end of this tutorial I'm going to show you how to render it scene out using Arnold so what I'm going to do is just add for now a standard Arnold shader and to do that I'm going to go into the hypershade which is inside this little blue button up here or going into windows rendering editor hypershade over here and inside the hypershade I'm going to look for an Arnold standard shader by typing a is into the search bar and look for the AI standard shader over here and I'm going to make one Arnold shader that's going to be the background grass and I'm going to make another one which is going to be just the grass itself and that will be a little color so if I select the background grass over here inside of the workspace or inside of here by selecting the materials for the background grass what I'm going to do is that I have an image which if I click this little checker pattern over here inside of the material views property editor I can come down here and look for something called file and inside file that's going to allow me to insert an image as a texture I'll click on this little folder over here and I downloaded a grass texture from textures comm over here with a free account as well check them out as well they have a huge selection of different textures for 3d and many of them are for free and a few of them are commercial as well so I've got this little color kind of light over here which is actually a little bit of grass over key which has been taken in as a texture so we'll tile my 3d scenes as well so I'll be talking more about texturing in a future tutorial as well so coming soon I'm going to get start building a small series all about texturing but at the very basic just to apply a texture to a 3d object I can move around in my viewport over here so that you guys can see what this actually looks like and click on the object over here and I can middle mouse button click and drag from my background grass onto my grass object over here and if I want to see the texture I just had to turn the texture on which is this little checkup atmosphere on my viewport filter and you can see that I've got kind of like a grassy type of texture applied to my material like that you guys can find any image online or check some of the textures of airy texture available at textures comm so for my blade of grass over here I'm going to select this object over here and I'm going to just add a base color to this for now and I'm going to do that by selecting the brass texture over here so I have bring up the grass texture properties I am going to double click over here on this color palette over here and inside the color picker I could choose any green color that I could want to or I could grab one of these eyedropper tools and just come over here and actually choose a color from the actual color Pickers over here it's a little bit dark so actually I'm going to drag it down a little bit I'm just going to use this slightly lighter and more saturated green but based off the color that is actually there from the image I'm going to hit done and then the same way I'm going to middle mouse button click and drag from my grass node over here onto the little grass geometry and then move this out the way if you need to and there we go we've just got something that's kind of like in Sentinel over here as well so that's kind of like a very quick and easy little way of doing some texturing but what I'm going to do next is I'm just going to add a little bit of animation to this blade of grass over here and I'm going to do that by just setting some keyframes down here on the curve l on the timeline over here I think my final scene is going to be about 300 frames long so I'm going to make that a little bit longer right now over here and what I'm going to do is not key absolutely every attribute which is here all I want to do is add some keys to be bend deformer so inside my channel box inside and bend over here I'm going to choose with my curvature a nice starting point for this grass and I'm just going to kind of like leave it kind of like swaying to one side like this maybe kind of like round kind of like 27 25 degrees however I want let's try 25 degrees like that and then what I'll do is that I will right-click on the channel boxes curvature name and then I'm going to come up to choose key selected and that will add a little key over here on frame 1 which will appear on my timeline I normally have Auto key turned on which is this little button which is like an eye with some spinning arrows going around it because that's we're going to allow me to create some keys automatically so as I click on this timeline and I scrub forwards in time like this so I can come over to let's say frame 40 over here I can add a little bit of a change to this over here and I'm just going to drag this down I'm going to exaggerate it a little bit normally I'd want to be a little bit more subtle but I can always change this later on so I'm going to give it about 50 degrees over there and then I'm going to scrub forward another 40 frames to frame 80 and I'm going to type in 25 degrees there so I end up having this little animation of this blade of grass kind of like moving side to side side to side don't worry if the scale of this doesn't seem to match the we're going to see these little blades of grass much much much much more than the ones which are on this over here so this is kind of like just fulfilling in the background per se and with that we're ready to start now taking this geometry over here this grass object which seems a good time for me to make sure that it's renamed to grass underscore geo to not confuse it with other things and this over here is going to be background BG geo there we go Masha's various tools which are really useful for us it has its own little shelf over here with some customizable buttons over here and if you are inside of the animation toolkit you'll see that there actually is a marsh menu over here which is fairly nice and dainty one of the more useful features is to configure your viewport over here and I normally like having my views split side by side like this so I've got my perspective view on my left and then I click on the panels over here and I look through panel outliner to have the outliner docked in here my scene that's a personal preference you can have a floating window as well if you want to by going to windows outliner but I find the outliner very useful because you have all of these objects which are easily selectable inside of your scene and you're going to see that mash hides some things away in just a sec the last piece of interface that I like bringing up as well is this very handy mash window which is the second icon on the mash shelf and this mash editor window over here allows me to actually see all of the components of my mash Network and select them with quite ease so what I need to do is simply click on my blade of grass over here because mash likes you to select a piece of geometry before you actually start kind of like laying things out and it will make copies of this piece of geometry by default so if I either push the mash button over here or I go into the menus mash create mash Network when I click this over here it's going to create several copies of my originally selected geometry now it's important for me to show you that now we've got a mash Network selected over here which if I double click over here and I look at my attribute editor over here you're going to see that a mash network is made out of three distinct tabs the first one is what's called the marsh waiter which holds many many many different types of operations that you can use creating all types of animated graphics or procedural effects and there's things which have kind of like a very intuitive name to them like color well that's for manipulating the color of your objects things like transform which have the capacity of changing the position rotation and scale of your object for example or you can have other things which are a bit more stranger like signal which adds a little bit of noise and randomness which is animated or things like audio which can allow you to create objects that would move in accordance to an audio file so you could change these things by combining them together and have something that's changing its scale by the sound of Soundwave effectively so you can create some really cool random effects by just combining all of these things together I'm going to show you a few of them today but the first one that you get by default is the mash distribute node which the mast distribute node what it does is by default it allows me to choose a distance of how far these objects are split apart like this and if I wanted more copies of this blades of grass so if I wanted 15 I could type in a specific number or I could use these sliders to create more and more copies of this object the last thing that's very important is this Marsh repo node over here and the mash repo who is actually a mesh so actually when mash is creating all of these objects it's creating copies and creating its own little mesh so everything is contained inside of here which is very handy because this should render out in Arnold or in any other renderer that would support geometry now it's important that we know that he the outliner my grass geo still exists the original object is still there but what happens is that it's hidden away and if I press shift H I can always reveal this object again and that really allows me a lot of power because I can use the move rotate and scale tool to change the shape of my object I can change the rotation of my object the original one and it will have a knock-on effect that it will change all of the properties of all of the other objects which are inside the mash repo mesh but I'm going to keep it hidden away so I'm going to press ctrl H but realize that it's there and you can always come back to it at any time I'm going to take the mesh Reaper node again by selecting kind of light for the mash network or I can also select the reaper mesh inside of here and you'll see that I can go in the tabs over to mash repo and also there's some properties here that allow you to have numerous instances of different geometry so if I modeled 3 or 4 different models of vegetation I could add them into this list and mash could randomly choose what is the geometry that is being displayed over here from a list of possible candidates so let's start putting this into practice and let's start populating mylan seen over here with some little blades of grass like this I'm going to take the mash distribute node so I'm going to click either here on the mush distribute on the mush editor over here which is really handy over here and I'm going to choose the type of distribution that I want I'm going to click here and I'm going to go to the drop-down menu and choose mesh now currently nothing happens and mash is telling me that I need to connect a mesh all of these different types of distribution map the drop-down menus which are inside of these panels over here and if I click down on the mesh options over here you'll see I have various options but it's also going to allow me to input an input mesh over here so I want this mesh over here to be connected to this node over here again this is where the outliner becomes really really really useful now be careful when you're selecting things because what I need you to do is middle mouse button drag the backgrounds geometry into this input mesh node over here but be careful because if you left-click on it by mistake your attribute editor will change to this over here so make sure that you've got the mouse distribute node selected by clicking on it in the mesh editor and again middle mouse button click and drag and you should just be able to drop that right into the input mesh and as soon as we do that mash by default will distribute all of my little pieces of grass all across the surface of this object like that now currently it's using a little scatter distribution to do this and there's not a lot of blades of grass over here that we can see I'm going to bump this number up a little bit to let's say 200 blades of grass I'm going to come over here and you can see that all of a sudden I've got something that is still fairly low resolution but it's starting to give me a little bit of an effect over here now the type of method for moving kind of like where these blades of grass will appear can be customized as well if I chose something like face center this is a very low poly object and you're going to see that it's only going to project one blade of grass out of every single polygon which is here inside of the mesh just like that so importantly scatter is absolutely fine but you can have a lot of fine-tuning for how this geometry actually looks and again if we went up into really high numbers so I tried 2000 pieces all of a sudden I've got this very kind of like very nice looking type of scene like that as well there'll be a limit to how many pieces the scatter can actually put as well so don't try to put things like 2 million or stuff like that at the end these pieces will end up overlapping one another up so slightly or it will look so solid that it almost looks like it's kind of been extruded kind of like out from the polygon faces so I'm just going to come down to two hundred to keep kind of like my scene nice and simple but a lot of times we're going to be jumping up and down the quality because later on for rendering we're going to boost these numbers up at the end so that we get kind of like a nice-looking scene like that now mash allows me lots of art direction controls right now currently this scatter is fairly random across my scene and I can use other mash nodes or mash effects you could say in order to create kind of like create a custom look for these blades of grass so to do that I always have to go back to the mash waiter which I basically can click in the mash editor over here or say for example if I'm in the mash repo mash or somewhere else I can also click on my outliner over here and it will always take me back to the mash waiter node over here so I'm going to add a new operation on top of all of this and I'm going to use a property called offset so I'm going to click here and add an offset node and that offset node will appear inside of my mash Network but nothing seems to happen just yet now offset allows me to create differences in relationship to the original geometry one of the easy sets to look at is for example position if I changed my position to be like 25 centimeters up in the y-axis you see that all of my blades of grass jump up into the air this is a very handy tool if I change my transformation mode from world to local where they're going to move along the direction of the blade of grass which will follow the terrain like this if I turn this back down to zero I think I can use can can I use control or Apple on a Mac here it's Apple on a Mac control on a PC control and the left mouse button drag allows me to spin these numbers interactively and I can actually position these blades of grass so if you have a blade of grass which is kind of like really inside the geometry like this just roll in left mouse button click and you can push that until it's almost outside a little bit of intersection is just fine this also works really well for the rotation because say for example they're all kind of like facing in this direction over here if I want them to be facing towards the other side over here I can type in a value over here in the offset rotation or again ctrl + middle mouse button click to actually start rotating them if the number I need is very large I can just type it in so I'll choose like 90 degrees over there is that a little bit too much no that's fine kind of like if I wanted it to be maybe 85 like that just to keep it a little bit offset from the axes there we go and now all of these blades of grass have been moved 90 85 degrees kind of like in this direction over here so again it's really handy for me again if I wanted to make these blades of grass smaller I should be able to type in say for example minus 0.5 over here I can make all the blades of grass smaller in the Y axes and if I copied that value into the x axis and the z axes for example I could again change the whole look of how this looks without going back to the original mesh over here for now I'm going to keep this at 0 over here again you can make it bigger as you can see over there and there we go we've got basically our offset all set up and Ray so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to add a little bit of randomness to the length of each one of these blades of grass so what I can do is come back into my mash waiter by clicking over here and I can look for a property which is accurately described as random and when I click on it add random node you're going to see that it's added a little bit of a position change to the x y&z so I can kind of like put these all back to 0 over here but what I can also do is start introducing changes to the x y&z scale so for example if I start boosting up the y axis over here you're going to see that now I'm going to end up with some much thinner pieces of grass just like this and each one of these is going to have its own little piece of length again the grass that I'm imagining of doing is actually kind of like fairly long so it would kind of like sit like this inside of my final scene so again I'm making kind of like a smaller patch kind of like a grass before I go again kind of like spraying this across a la March largest scene like that so it's a zoomed up kind of like macro version like that and if I wanted to I could also introduce a little bit of change to the x-axis as well again I'm going to keep that fairly subtle as well just so that all of them have their own little bit of distinct shape and really I don't want them to be kind of like randomly fatter and thinner than one another they'll start looking like french fries or something like that but now you can start seeing how kind of like graphically this starts looking like a little bunch of grass just like this okay so what I'm going to do next is after I've added a little bit of randomness I do want to show you guys a property over here which is called strength and strength is common in a lot of the mash nodes because what it does is that all of these effects are layered one on top of one another and if you think about it as in Photoshop the strength node is actually like the opacity in Photoshop where I can turn the strength of this effect down or up I might think that this kind of light looks great but sometimes just relaxing an effect a little bit so it's not kind of like fully applied makes it look kind of nice as well and I can actually see kind of like my nice little blades of grass like that coming through the actual camera which is great so again the strength property is very much like the opacity layer and another great advantage of the mesh editor window over here is that all of these mash nodes have kind of like a little on and off button as well so if I want it to take this random mode and just turn it off to see what I had before I can click on it here and it basically hides that nodes effect and then I can turn the node back on just by clicking this over here so you end up having like a fine fine fine level of control of making all these things now if we look at our timeline for example I created a piece of animation that was you know a few frames long and what happens is that if I scroll through the timeline you see that that animation is being applied to every single individual blade of grass like this and you'll see that it will start around frame 80 over here so importantly the animation isn't continuing on and on and on and on and on and on and on all the way through the animation timeline I only created one thin cycle move left move right and what I want to do is loop this animation in terms of looping animation we have another marsh node which is called the time node over here and if I click on the time node over here and hit add time node what it's going to do is it's going to start looking for animation which already exists inside of my scene and I know that my animation starts on frame 1 actually and it ends on frame 80 but because I don't want two copies of the same frame I'm actually going to end it one frame before my final keyframe which is seventy nine like that so now if I drag through my timeline like this you're going to see that all of these blades of grass and now moving continuously through all of my timeline like this so if I made my timeline 5,000 frames long they'll keep adding animating on and on and on for infinity okay now the time property tends to have a few useful tools as well one of the very handy things that it does is that you can stagger your frames so that not all the blades of grass start at the same time so if I stagger these by let's say 10 frames over here it's going to add a little bit of random variation to when each one of those blades will start animating so if I start moving them like this you're going to see that they're not really moving at the same time I can make it completely random if I wanted as well and they're all going to jump to a different frame assigned by a random algorithm however this will slow down your processor quite a lot because Matt Mash has to calculate all of the movement which is here so sometimes it's worthwhile for us to design an effect like the time node and do it at a lower resolution so for example if I choose the distribute node again and I come up to the top and instead of using 200 let's use 50 frames over here to have a lot less blades of grass in my scene and I come back up to the time node over here I should get a little boost of performance over here now for my liking these blades of grass they shouldn't really kind of like be moving completely randomly they would have a little bit of kind of like similar movement as the wind kind of like gushes across them so I'm going to turn off the random stagger over here and I'm going to turn on the stag of frames and my animation is about kind of like 40 frames about half of it long so I'm going to give it kind of like 20 frames of offsets over here so it should create a little bit of a wavy type of motion just like that again we can tweak this later on but there's also a few other interesting properties inside of the time node and one of the very cool ones to play around with is this option over here which is called time scale the way that Maya plays around with time scale is that I can change how fast objects are moving based on their animation what that means is that if I wanted to lower the time scale over here and let's say I chose a value of 0.25 for example and I pressed play you're going to see that everything barely moves because we're lowering the time scale which means that everything looks like it's playing back in slow motion if I choose a value that is higher than one so for example I boost it up to six and I press play you're going to see that now all the blades of grass are going to be moving at a much higher speed if I chose something really high like 25 for example hopefully they should start moving around like crazy just like that okay so again time scale very useful thing if you ever need to vary it you can also use random time scale so that some are moving quickly some are moving slightly slower that I don't think is very kind of like realistic for this specific scenario it might be interesting to use it for something like a swarm of bees or things that have to move at kind of like different speeds but here it would something that we don't have to so I think my animation was just a little bit slow so I'm going to leave my time scale down to a value of 2 over there and again we get this kind of like very nice soft blowing breeze type of effect just like this there we go so I'm going to stop this here and what I'm going to do next is I'm going to go ahead and again bring back some of the shapes that we had before in distribute note and I'll boost this up to 200 and what you should see is that if I go back to the beginning of my timeline and I press play now my computer is going to cry and do this but my poor little laptop is actually going to start struggling a lot to kind of like keep this animation going if I press stop over here or escape on my keyboard just imagine how slow this would go for real-time playback if I brought in 2000 pieces of grass into my scene like that which I think's a little bit too high but to prove a point it's very important that I'm always going to bring this number up at the very end and now that I've designed the mash time node oh here I can actually turn this off for now and actually just leave this here and know that later on I just need to turn this on before I render and actually let kind of like the mash Network just play around like this over here so it's important for us to be comfortable kind of like going back and forth between these nodes sometimes turning them off other times going into the distribute and again I think one thousands too much of us sorry 2002 much so let's try 1200 I'm still looking for that ideal kind of like grassy type of look like that and I think that's kind of like quite nice and thick to be kind of like some savanna type grass like that I'm now going to create another effect on top of this because what I wanted to do was actually I wanted to have kind of like the wind actually blowing parts of this grass a side kind of like I've got some interesting reference videos that I was looking at where you could really see kind of like grass being pushed by certain forces of air and sometimes it looks at forms like these interesting depressions in the actual grass so what I'm going to do is I'm going to apply an effect as if I was blowing down with a hair dryer directly on top of the grass over here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to add another node over here so I'm going to go back into my mash waiter and I'm going to look for something that's called orient over here and I'm going to add an orient node now this is radically going to change the look of my grass and I'm going to have to really kind of like customize it a little bit currently it's chosen to aim at target and that's fine but I want to change my up vector in my case to Z so you can see that it forms kind of like a parallel with the z axis over here you've got a little bit of margin to actually use this solo button over here to kind of like move it around a little bit so I'm going to move this to Zolo Z over here as well and remember that you also have a strength property here as well so this looks way too flat for me remember that with strength very much like the opacity imagine that this is now being blown by a huge gust of wind coming from the left to right of the screen just like that moving all the blades of grass in that direction like that freeze frame perfect okay so this is kind of like the look that I'm going for where all the blades of grass have been pushed into a very unnatural position for them and it would be great for me if I can control how much of this effect is displayed again thanks to the strength property or the release property I want to find a way of transitioning between if I turn my orient node off I want to go from here and turn this on in a controlled manner just like this so to do that fortunately enough and mash we've got these wonderful little things called form of objects if I choose a fall-off object over here and I right-click on the full of object area and hit create it will create this little series of spheres which are inside of here now this full of object we can scale up using the scale tool and what happens is that you'll see that we get this little movable object which as we move it across the scene you're going to see that it's going to affect the grass and this again in animator mode is pretty much what I was trying to creative kind of like seeing kind of like a sudden gust of wind rippling through here and seeing all of pieces of grass just flutter in that direction very cool so what I want to do is have this little fall-off object and if I want it to be bigger or smaller I should be able to select the full off match object inside of the outliner over here and you can see that I can change the way that this fall-off works the inside over here is a hundred percent of the actual effect and it gradually will fade off as it reaches the edge of this object I can use these little transition grids over here and change the type of fall-off to smooth to create something that's a little bit more organic like that and then I can also change the size of the inner zone as well where that effect is more complete I'm going to leave it still fairly low like that but it's something that's going to push all of these blades of grass just like that and then move across the screen like that very very very very simply okay now to help me do this I could use keyframes as well but I'm going to use a animated motion path I'm going to build that by going into my panels also grab and choosing the side view and looking to see if I can see kind of like the edge of my kind of light little help over here and what I'm going to do is draw a curve with my ax over here which will allow me to control where this fall-off object is moving so what I'm going to do is come into here and change to the curves and surfaces tab over here and I'm going to click the Maya curve tool over here and that will allow me to click over here and what I want to do is draw this curve in the direction that I want my animation to go so I'm going to click on the left hand side over here and that will draw a point and I will draw another point and as soon as I draw a third point you're going to see that the my curve tool is going to draw a curve that goes down like this and then I'm going to draw another curve slightly up like this another point slightly down like this and then I'm going to add another current point that goes off into the distance so I might kind of like this little kind of like wavy type pattern over here and once I'm ready I press ENTER to confirm that this will be my curved spline inside of Maya and this will be like a set of trails that this object will actually travel on like this and to get that to work what I need to do is select the fall off object either in the outliner or in my viewport shift + select the curve over here and inside the animation toolkit I need to make sure that I look inside the constrain panel over here I look for motion paths and I choose attach to motion path now the motion path is really cool because what it does is that now as I scrub through my timeline from beginning to end over here if I click and drag it will now move this object across that curve like that and you can see and it follows the shape of the spline that I drew from frame 1 noted here in green to frame 300 over here if we wanted to change the timing of this in any way we would go into Windows animation editors graph editor and inside here we should have an animation curve which we could manipulate and move by using the move tool over here so it starts a little bit earlier it ends a little bit later over here and again I could choose the interpolation of this curve as well if I wanted it to be straight if I wanted it to be automatic but this of the whole series of animation tutorials as well so if you want to learn how to use the graph editor inside of Maya I've got a tutorial ready for that as well but again I'm keeping things very very very simple so now my animation is just coming over here and it's going to move around the animated motion path has another advantage as well which is that if I come into my perspective view now wherever this spline is drawn that's where the animation is going to go and actually I want my animation to move across the diagonal kind of like my scene like this so I can grab this spline at any point right click on it and just like with geometry splines have control vertices and these vertices which appear kind of like in this little purple type of magenta ash color if I click and drag on them over here they highlight yellow and I can use the Move tool to move these points anywhere where I want inside of my scene and that's going to be really handy for me because it's going to allow me again to direct where is this path going and again we want something that's nice and curvy as well so I'm going to come over here and keep moving things there should be another control points somewhere around there there it is and you're going to see that what I'm going to do is just position these points across here I've also got the advantage that I can put them lower and higher if I want to as well so I can get the perfect positioning for my little scene over here and again I'm just going to come over here like this like this selects points as I go and also I can start moving through the animation like this and any time I come to a timeline point like this and kind of like click and drag on that control point and I can choose how far down is this effect gonna go is it higher is it lower again and again what I'm doing is just adding a little bit of art direction here here the fall-off isn't strong enough so I'm going to grab the next control point and bring it down so it's a little bit more subtle like that then I'm going to bring it down deeply like that and I think that's a little bit too low so I want to do is just drag it like this and move it up at the end like that's what it's going to peel off very nicely like that so again almost like a tiger walking through the actual grass there it goes perfect so again now we've got a little animation over here which I will have independent movement from the actual blades of grass but even at this level with timeline turned off you're going to see that I have my little blade of grass moving along here and again I'm going to have to check if this is playing back in real time so for that I have to make sure that I'm not actually just trusting what I see in my viewport I need to render a little test video even from the viewport over here so to do that what I'm going to do is right-click on my timeline and go to play blast and I'm going to choose some play blast options inside of here and I'm going to be using the standard settings inside of flavor and inside of the playlist if I wanted to take my render settings over here and render those out that would be better I could render out a full frame or half a frame in terms of its resolution like that I normally don't like using any type of frame padding over here and again we do have the option to save our play blasts as well which if we've set our money projects out they should save directly into the movies folder like that okay we got played last I like giving it a little number and I'll just save you two guys a little bit of time but we push this playlist button and that will render out a small little video with every frame that should look like this okay so based on my play blast I just changed things ever so slightly by just making my animation kind of like a little bit shorter so I had the time for the object to finish moving change to one hundred and fifty frames over here in the attribute editor and you can click on these little dots at the end here just to make things a little bit faster now it's from frame ten to frame 150 and this plays back a little bit sooner again I'm not seeing any of the moving grass right now I'm going to leave that for later on and I can tweak it as we go moving along but now's a good time to start testing a render to see how this looks over here and importantly inside of Arnold we have to make sure that we actually have a light I'm going to show you guys how to make a very quick and simple light inside of Arnold it's not very complex but it's good enough for us to actually start looking at how things look without having a lot of texture work inside of here so inside Arnold I'm going to look for light and I'm going to choose a sky dome light now with this sky dome light set up over here creates a big sphere over here which is a light which is inside of Arnold over here and if i zoom in over here you guys should be able to see that we can see all of these pieces these pieces of grass and if I do a quick test render by pressing the render board up here you're going to see that I end up with a quick and dirty render inside of my scene over here don't worry if there's a lot of noise inside of here it's fairly normal as well and I apologize as well if the fans of my laptop kind of light start going crazy as well because they're going to be struggling away but actually making this as well so right now it does look like it's fairly thick right now it still looks fairly blocky I could improve the geometry look at this so I could go back to that original object and kind of like change it but for now as an example is a little patch of grass is actually going to work quite fine now there's a few things with presentation that I want to do here and the number one thing that I want to do is that I want my light to have a little bit of color to it so I'm going to turn on use color temperature over here the other thing is that currently I've got this big black background inside of my scene as well and I want to opt in is Arnold a little bit so that it's given me something that looks fairly nice that I can show it to you guys so what I'm going to do is just close down the render views for a second I'm going and go into the render properties menu which is a little clapper board with the gearbox on it next to the hypershade and I'm going to look inside of the Arnold renderer tab now I have some specific settings for Arnold to keep rendering quickly now my scene has no volume indirect light so I'm going to turn that to zero it's got no surface subsurface scattering it has no refractive materials it doesn't really have any glossy materials because I haven't really used a glossy channel for this tool so I can turn all of these properties down to zero the other thing I'm going to do is well for now is turn this property down to two or even one it's going to make my image more grainy if I turn the camera AAA anti-aliasing to two but it's going to render a lot faster and I'm going to leave this like this for all the tests that I'm going to do so far the other thing that I want to do is because this is an animation and I'm going to render frames out at the end of it I'm going to turn on lock sampling pattern now this will have a little bit to make sure that when we render out at the end the grows that appears here is not going to be kind of like dancing all over the animation because we've got moving parts inside of our scene so we're going to lock our sampling pattern over here it'll make the quality look a little bit better and now with these settings set up over here Arnold's got a great little tab down here which is called environment which allows me to insert a background image as my environment so if I click over here and choose create a sky shader that's going to create a flat color for the background of my entire scene now this color I could change it to any color I want to if I wanted to I could use kind of like a nice blue type color like that to create a sky type of effect but I actually prefer always instead of having a solid color in my background just to throw in for presentation a gradient ramp so I click on this little checkered pattern over here which will bring up the a random node window over here and then I'll scroll down it until I find a property that is called ramp and ramp we'll add in this little gradient over here which to change the color of it I need to check the little sphere at the top of this click over here and that blue color that I chose I can click over here like so and again this will be the color that will be at the top of the image and this will be the color that will be at the bottom of the image and I can drag them left and right to change their sides and stuff like that and I can click on this one over here and I'm going to choose again a slightly different tone of lighter blue like this and hit done like that so I've created an Arnold night a light of speeded up my render and I've created a background color using the AI sky with a gradient ramp over here and the great thing about Arnold is that Arnold helps us project light into our scene based on the colors that we've chosen here ok so I've had to switch to one of the versions that I was actually testing out things before I made this tutorial because my maya crashed just as it load the the render view and in good old fashioned thing ways i hadn't saved in a while and actually it's easier for me to actually go back to one of the test versions that had made for rather than rebuilding the whole scene again for you guys so apologies about that but it's a good reminder to save often in maya because it will always do nasty things to you especially when you're trying to present to people but that's a part of the game pretty much so i'm going to be saving much more often than before but hopefully you should have been able to get something that didn't crash and kind of like looks like this as well it's not specific to the Arnold renderer it can just be bugs that come from a huge variety of reasons so always saved often when you're doing tight any type of dynamic work as well so this version is very fairly similar to the one we had before we still have the same textures we still have kind of like a motion path over here as well it just looks a little bit different now but again I've got blades of grass coming across a little plane like this so what I wanted next is use a little bit of power of that mash has as well to create some variation of color from each one of these blades of grass and I'm going to do that by adding a color node onto my little stack over here so I'm going to go over here and I'm going to look for the color node or look for the color node over here but they're all in alphabetical order if you've noticed so far so it's very easy for me to hit this plus button over here in the mash editor and that's another way of adding nodes to this list now the mash color node should color the whole object if it has been set up with a standard Maya shader so things like Lambert blend but you're going to notice that all of this stuff looks like it's you know just still green because it's got an Arnold shader tied to it so we need to tell mash and Arnold to use a specific property which is called vertex shading vertex shading is going to allow me to take different parts of this repo mesh and have each blade of grass have its own little color so to do that what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the repo mesh and what I'm going to do is go into the modeling tools over here go into mesh display and inside mesh display I'm going to go down and I'm going to hit something called toggle display colors attribute over here and that's going to allow me to start turning on this vertex coloring the next thing that I want to is also inside of here is to go into the repo mesh shape node and click down on not render stats the Arnold drop-down window over here and you're going to see something here which is called which I can tick which is called export vertex colors inside of the Arnold tab so the next thing that I need to do is to go go into my hypershade or select the texture over here I'm going to do it by right-clicking on the repo mesh and holding and I'm going to look down here to this area that says material attributes and with material attributes turned on over here I'm going to go into the color section over here and I'm going to add an Arnold shader now if I look down in the list of the render nodes over here there's an option over here which is shader and inside of shader what I'm going to do is I'm going to look around for a shader called a I user data color I'm going to click on that you can see that everything goes dark like this over here and what I want to do is that's probably a good sign is just type in here the color attribute name which by default should be color set thanks for the documentation from over the Handy videos from mainframe as well then let us know all these things so currently what I've got is I have my Maya texture over here which is currently let me not go into object mode let me go back to object mode I'm going to go back into the material attributes I've gone into the diffuse color inside my Arnold shader and I've created a color set over here and that color set basically is running off this little kind of like a I user data shader which is unique to Arnold the next thing is I'm typing in manually color and that's the American color writing with capital S et inside of here to use the color set and now hopefully if I go into my mesh color node I should be able to change the color of my mesh by changing the color of the objects in here so if I went into my little drop-down menu over here and chose a color from the background texture over here and I pressed render we should see if these items have been colored okay so apologies if my fans are going off a little bit loud in the background it's because I've got the Maya Arnold renderer turned on over here and one of the fun things about this is that as soon as we have our interactive renderer turned on I can come into the mesh color node over here and I can start seeing some variations in the color by using this mesh color node over here again like everything inside of Maya let me just turn this on for a sec so it can start caching to an extent this is going to allow me to make some random changes here the most noticeable one is that if I bump up the random hues I can create really really really weird colors inside of here but this will always be based off a base color inside of Maya and if I look to see where my little color window disappeared there we go just going to make sure it's a nice saturated color over here and later on I'll add a few more variants to it over here and I'll hit done so I really don't want to make huge changes to the hue because you're going to see that that's kind of creates a really odd-looking grass it's going to come over here I'm just going to add like a little bit of a point 3.5 type of a zero point no let's go up and again I'm just using the interactive the renderer to say okay point one seems more than enough variation to create a color hue difference again it's because I'm in the green scale the color palette I think the saturation can vary a little bit as well I'm going to make that a little bit higher in this one over here so I'm going to have some very bright in saturated blades brass and pretty low in saturated again I'm waiting for my rock my render view from Arnold to cache the middle over here you can see it's one full interactive display over here and then the value is how light and how dark are these blades of grass and I can really really really push the colors with you well I might have to turn some of my colors down a little bit inside of my Maya lighting is currently it's a little bit too strong so if I come into my a is going a SkyDome of and I changed my exposure down to zero that's a little bit too dark let's change the exposure to one over there let's just see what's coming out there there we go if I want my image brighter or darker I can click on the AI sky down light the outliner and using the exposure value this is a great way of selecting how bright and how dark your elements are if I go back to the color node I think the random value here is a little bit too high there's some very dark blades of grass I just want to make them a little bit lighter like that and that is just going to do me fine perfect like that so I've got something that's now starting to look like a patchy piece of grass which if i zoom out over here when you look at this from a distance you're going to see that it's kind of like going to be a little bit indistinguishable from the real thing now I can keep editing this to make it kind of like look better and better and better and better but remember that all of this detail is kind of like ready to be animated so I'm going to turn off the interactive view and now to finish off what I would want to do is that now that I've got my variation now that I've got my little pieces of animation over here with my little fall-off object there we go and I could turn the time over here and if I wanted to we come back to shadeless version over here cam I think that that's kind of like got a good distribution but I could come back into the distribute node and in this scene specifically I think 1500 legs of grass like that is more than enough it's already fairly full like that it's this time where now we're going to bump up all of the properties turn on on mesh time and instead of going through this whole timeline of one step at a time what we do is that we're going to render out an animation and to do that what I need to do is go back into my settings over here and inside my render settings I have to have my project set up and what I need to do is save which ever format I want to do any XR a jpg I'm just going to use a jpg right now because I'm going to turn it into a video that I'm going to upload online and what I'm going to do is make sure that quality can be fine it's going to have a gamma tied to it as well which is fine with me as well because I'm going to not be doing any compositing with this and what I want to do is change the name to name number extension over here because that's what's going to allow me to create an image sequence over here and then I want to choose how much of this animation do I want to render out to save myself a little bit of time I'm going to render out say about a hundred and eighty frames again I could render up the entire thing but some of it I think should be fine if we crop some of the frames off at the end over there and choose a camera to render out now if I want to render out the perspective camera I'm just going to check that I'm actually going to render this out from an interesting point of view so I might scrub through the animation over here very briefly there we go and just look at a part that looks kind of like interesting like this frame over here and again waiting for my computer to catch up because it's doing multiple things at the same time I might just turn the time node off for a second and go to a specific frame like so so again I might just look to see if I can actually see this particular frame from a specific angle over here so I can position my camera maybe just like that okay so now that I know that this is the area that's going to be rendered out if I wanted to change the size I could choose any other size over here and I'll probably do a 720 HD frame because that's what I'm rendering out from Camtasia as well while I'm doing my screen captures and then I'm going to make sure that all of this is checked and once that is set I would go into using the rendering tools over here now inside the rendering tools over here I can't render out with batch render so I'm going to be rendering out with the new image sequence tool over here so when we're going to start rendering things out we have to start considering how we're going to save our scene and how long everything's going to take inside of the render settings now would be the time that we would crank up how many subdivisions we would have kind of like in sorry on how much our sampling rate would be for our anti-aliasing and I think kind of like a value of six three kind of like gives us quite a very heavy scene it takes quite a long time for it to actually render but rendering sometimes takes a lot of time ideally you would want to have a quite a powerful computer to be rendering things out the anything that's a render time that's over you know a couple of minutes per frame is kind of like going to be kind of a fairly hard for you to do on just a desktop computer you should probably find kind of like some additional render power to actually help things out there but just over here because I want to get this video actually done today I'm not going to be rendering out this whole sequence for you guys unfortunately I'll try see actually if I can render it out with a little bit more quality over the week and maybe I'll post what a version of it online so you guys can see what it looks like when it's finished on the channel but at the same time depending on how high these settings are if I bring them down to four and to two there's going to be a little bit of grain inside of my image but it will render a lot faster about kind of like 20 seconds every single frame which is quite manageable in and of itself and again if I bring down the render size as well it's going to make my frames much much much easier for me to render out as well instead of rendering at this higher quality I could go to half the size of an HD frame over here with a slightly smaller version so importantly you can render out single images over here I managed to render this image out over here which is still very blocky but it's still kind of like showing some of the potential that this has for creating again procedurally generated content the fun thing about this is that I modeled just one thing and I'm populating a scene with multiple elements inside of here and if I wanted to I could change these blades of grass for more detailed models later on and then I'm adding variety of colors creating animated effects either by looping animations or creating my own motion curves to create things so mash has got a lot of potential for definitely motion graphics but I just wanted to show you guys something that's a little bit more scene based per se and also that you can start understanding how all of these mash nodes start working with one another and how you can create just an infinity of amazing effects as well just be careful with your computers because it's very easy to crash your computer if it runs out a memory or runs into a bug so always make sure that you're saving as often as you possibly can and with that that's the end of this tutorial for today there's actually some more things that I want to do with mash as well so I'm going to be making maybe a few little tests every once in a while and I might be uploading these videos and if you want me to explore more things with mash or how you can actually do things well I'm learning this software the same way that you guys are as well so hopefully as I go discovering things I'll kind of like keep populating the channel with more and more things so if you want to know specifically kind of like how we can do things I can't guarantee an answer but I'll definitely give it my best shot so with that keep learning keep strong I'm going to be posting a new tutorial about texturing on Tuesday and I look forward to seeing you then so until then take care bye bike

Channel: yone santana

Views: 88,370

Keywords: Maya, 2017, Yone, Santana, yonesantana, 3D, Tutorial, Motion, Graphics, Dynamics, UK, Autodesk, beginner, MASH, mash, grass, wind, 1000k, Thanks

Id: 6a7303eCTHI

Length: 68min 43sec (4123 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2016