Maya's Secret Weapon for 3D Artists - MASH

now we've been talking a lot lately about different software that you can be using there's maya there's blender we haven't really talked about cinema 4d and houdini and so on but there's a lot of different 3d tools out there you can use for a variety of different things i'm not a big fan of the whole software war thing of trying to pick one or the other which one's better which one's worse doesn't matter however a lot of people are sleeping on maya for one specific set of tools is it another tool set that autodesk bought at some point and shoved into maya yes but does that change the way i feel about it no it's flipping awesome what we're talking about today is maya's motion graphics tool set which hang in there because for a lot of people that doesn't sound like it's something that's all that useful for animators for modelers like why would you care about motion graphics tool sets i'm gonna show you this is my absolute favorite thing in all of maya i love it it's the coolest set of features that you can use for animation you can use for modeling you can use for a whole bunch of stuff procedural effects it's awesome it's kind of if cinema 4d after effects blender and maya all had a weird baby together and it lived inside of maya it's really powerful and it's what i consider to be maya's secret weapon to make it a really cool piece of software and if anyone watching is a blender user and you're like ah man i don't want to watch a maya video you can do this in maya fairly easily and then move it to blender if you want to use cycles or ev to do the rendering over there totally up to you either way you're gonna see some cool stuff in this video in case you're new here hi i'm sir wade i do a ton of animation stuff here on the channel and if you enjoy this video want to see more like it hit subscribe down below ring the notification bell so you don't miss new uploads and if you would like to see me use these tools live maybe come up with ideas and suggestions of things that i should try making with these tools happy to do it live on twitch couple days a week links below or to support the channel and get more educational resources a link to my patreon as well down below now let's stop stalling and let me show you the coolest thing in all of maya i'm super excited to make this video mash motion graphics tool set all right so here we are on maya the first thing i'm going to do is go to the top left corner change modeling to effects and i'm going to go to the motion graphics shelf this is the best way to work for mash also to make sure you have this enabled you want to go to windows settings preferences plugin manager and then scroll down until you see mash you want to make sure that this is loaded you can also make sure this as well as a few other things are unchecked if you're trying to get mine to boot up faster i have another video on just speeding up my faster workflows things like that but in this case we're gonna go ahead and load this plug-in pretty much the same thing as blender's add-ons at this point once you have that loaded up we're going to take any mesh literally i could delete this and start over with a cube i could start over with a plane it does not matter at all any mesh a full character a cube a prop that you modeled keep it low res for now because it'll be faster you're going to select the object and you're going to click on this button in the top left corner to create a mash network out of that object what happens is you suddenly have 10 of them now it's important that i show you how this works under the hood that original cube still exists it's hidden it's right there these are what's called instances of this cube each of these instances are called points a mashed point they all reference this initial cube so if i change the scale of the cube they inherit those values if i rotate it they do the same thing so the scale the rotation the translation doesn't matter but it's it's inheriting any of the changes which also means geometry changes because if i go ahead and move this face it'll do the same thing we'll come back to that a bit i'm going to hide that for now so we now have a mash object and if i go over from the channel box to the attribute editor you see all this magical stuff a lot of good stuff here let's break it down the first thing that happens is you get a distribution node so i'm gonna talk about nodes a little bit so if i go to the mash editor we're gonna see what these nodes are you can treat them like layers um they're basically just like layers but they're also nodes doesn't matter what you're getting here is a stacked view of each of the effects that you're applying in order the order matters you can turn them off and on different things when you create a mash network it takes that original geometry sets it as the object to instance and then creates a mash distribution node which is basically just saying how do you want to distribute these points do you want them in a line do you want a certain number of them do you want them in a certain offset distance from each other things like this so if you want to have a hundred of them you'll notice they're all just kind of stacked on top of each other but there are 100 cubes i can offset the distance bring that number down just so i can see them better but you can kind of see i can adjust the number of points the distance between them i can offset them in z space i can rotate them i can keyframe all of these values regardless of what i'm doing you can right click any attribute and say set key set driven key create an expression whatever you want to do but this is just putting them all on a line we can change this to a radial network where i can change the number of points in a circle we can make it a full ring and you can mess with all kinds of different attributes so let's just say i've got 100 of them let's crank up that radius and another thing too is if these sliders don't go far enough for you you're like oh i wanted it bigger these are just suggestions you can change this number to anything you want if i just make this 30 it changes the slider to now reflect my new range so don't let the sliders tell you what the limits are there are no limits believe in yourself but with this radial network i can change the axis i can put it on the ground i can have it kind of do a spiral staircase up with the offset there's a whole bunch of stuff you can do we can do a sphere which doesn't really look like all that much so let's crank this up to a thousand points let's make it ten thousand points once you get to a certain point it starts to get hard to see what you're looking at so that's where you want to go to your renderer settings you may want to make a few adjustments to the viewport for example ambient occlusion can really help define objects and you may also want to turn on anti-aliasing if your computer can handle it but even though i have a really beefy desktop computer i do this for demos when i go speak at schools and things like that i always show these tools and i do it on a laptop so i'm on a laptop most of the time when i'm traveling and all of this works fantastically very quickly it doesn't matter what computer you have you can do this especially if you're just using a basic cube the more geometry in that original object the more that this is going to take processing power wise but just so you know the overall system here it's very fast now there's other distribution methods and we'll talk about more of them in a bit but what you need to know is that every single one of these layers you can turn it off and on which is just turning off the distribution they don't exist at that point turning them back on every single one of those has a strength drop down that strength applies to you know whatever you want it to apply to it's an on and off scale so turn it off they don't get applied turn it on there you go it gets really interesting when you randomize that [Music] sound effects are completely required in fact let's go professional with the sound effects to demonstrate this a little bit better i'm going to go to a grid network so i'm going to go ahead and change the distance between all these the grid size and now we've got 25 times 25 times 25 cubes it's a lot of cubes you can see they're all in there a whole bunch of them and if i change the strength i can again turn it off turn it on i can randomize that strength i can also step through so that's just in order each of these points has a number assigned to it and so you can have it go in either direction to build in a certain way you can also use maps different textures different things if you want to carve out certain pieces that's fine there's a lot you can do i'm not going to cover every little detail but what i am going to show you is what happens when you start to combine effects so this is all just distributing them this is all just putting them in the scene we haven't done anything yet what i can do is start to combine different nodes on top of each other for example i'm going to say random node add and it automatically has some values attached i'm going to turn them off and by the way sometimes this mash editor is a little buggy it's not showing me the random node so i'll just close it and reopen it happens all the time now you can see there's a randomization node which says currently not doing anything so if i randomize position in any axis you can see what it does rotation in various ways uh scale and very quickly you can see ah we have our buildings that's our city and so what you can do is you can combine the rotation values for example to just make this crazy like shape of cubes all this by the way exports to a single mesh so it's easy to work with and do other things with but let's just say i want to do that and i want to have it randomly kind of come apart i can just use the random step strength to have it do that and if i have it on i can also change the random seed if i don't like the way it's doing it if i don't like the pattern i can adjust the randomization just to mess with it but i'll go ahead and also adjust the random position just to get a little bit more variety out of that as well so now we just have this crazy uh just go crazy there you go crazy it's crazy but you can see we just have this insane network of cubes that we can just move through and try to like animate the camera through or whatever you want to do let's do another node let's just add for example a color node i'm just going to add a few more of these show you what they do um there's a color node so if i just pick let's go let's go orange it's the opposite of blue it'll stand out nicely against this background so i can do a base color we can randomize the hue so we can just go full rainbow random you can change the saturation of them we can change the value which is kind of dark and light there's also blending modes if you want to really get into it you can do all kinds of stuff here but again there's a strength node every single one of these has a strength note so i can turn off the color turn on the color randomly turn on and off the color so if that's something you need to do you can have colors kind of popping up or again you can have it come from the bottom to the top because it's stepped we've only just scratched the surface i want to show you a lot more but i want to do this in a little bit of a better way so let's say that i turn off the color remember that we have that original cube i want to show you something else about how the instancing works if i take this original cube this is what they're all based off i can scale it and you can see they're still linked what i'm going to do is assign a new material just to this face specifically i'm going to say make it a lambert let's go orange and then we'll make this top color nothing crazy just you know two colors and the rest is gray but you see that applied to all of them so if you make a change to one they all inherit it a vertex and i'll pull this up so it's a very very powerful system because it's entirely modular which is again just one big mesh that we could easily delete the history and just have an object so let's go back to the random node and i'm going to just boost this up way more and say these are you know this giant which by the way if you look at how this originally looked it was this which comes out to here what i'm going to do now is control this in a more interesting way that really helps us for animation what i'm going to show you here is fake effects procedural effects that we don't have to simulate if you want destruction this is how you can do it this is how you can fake it go to the falloff object section of the random node so falloff object is a way to either connect geometry or different things i'm going to right click here i'm going to say create and what it does is it creates this little kind of locator thing which by itself is just saying hey the random node now is attached to this thing to say it applies only when this object gets close enough to have influence over our network and you can kind of see what this looking like and again it's not simulating it's all procedural the values are all predetermined so it doesn't need to take any time to simulate it just has to blend between off and on we can also click over here to invert the falloff so if i make this bigger you can see that it actually puts it back together so if we just have it here there it goes it kind of undisintegrates or we can have it stay here make it bigger and move it away and it will disintegrate and we've got our avengers effect just like that easy something i like to do is to create a sphere and put it in place actually i'll just do this lock it with my animbot buttons and what i'll do is i'll just parent it from one to the other so if i move this ball and i move it in it just destroys the cube but you don't have to keep it as geometry this object can be a whole bunch of different stuff the falloff object it can be a sphere cube a nurbs curve you can have it be particles specifically you can have it be a mesh and then it will look for a mesh if you select mesh you need to come down here to connections and then it'll ask what you're trying to connect it to so if i come back and let's just grab a torus which is our donut shape and go like that what you'll want to do is middle mouse drag whatever the object is from the outliner into the shape in and now it's going to use that object as the driver so i pull this in bam now the only trick here is it's kind of teleporting them out that's because the falloff object had that that distance that kind of inner and outer radius that it could blend between in this case it's kind of off and on the moment it hits the mesh it's just activating the full effect and you can mess with different things to try and get that working to your liking you can mess with the inner zone you can there are ways to play with that another thing we can do is just come back to the random area and just adjust these values so that maybe they're not as aggressive that way the values aren't that aggressive and whether or not you're choosing to animate this because you can animate this maybe it's just a matter of trying to get a look for you know set dressing just trying to make it feel like this object has been here cost some destruction and then it's just been left for a couple years obviously we need to tweak some stuff but you get the idea let's move on to other cool things now mash is especially good for any kind of set dressing layout building a scene modeling effects lighting there's a lot of things you can do with this i'm going to show you a few examples just that i've pre-made that i can just quickly breeze through and show you some stuff before i do let me show you one more thing about the distribution node that i think you're really going to like so we just make a new scene and we're going to take this cube once again throw it in a network we get that linear distribution once again and what i'm going to do this time is go to the distribute node and change it from linear to mesh it's once again going to be looking for a mesh input so i'm going to middle mouse drag the taurus into the input mesh here now it's going to use that as the source of where i can kind of create these points from you can actually fake an emitter you can do all kinds of crazy stuff but what i can do is animate move this around and these points are just stuck there from now on now if i scale it you can see it gets a little bit weird they don't quite lock on and there are some behaviors that we can adjust if you want to mess with that so for example some things you can do let's get like a thousand of these make this look really cool we can get like greebles basically you know that term to make this object look really big like a spaceship i can do the same thing where you do you know strength in this case starts to look a little bit different now we get kind of like a wormhole type of deal going on yeah so we can get creative with it but another thing i can do is change the method so right now it's on just scatter randomly across the object we can go by vertex using this method we can have it build around in order you can do face center all different things you can also voxelize it which if you don't know what a voxelize is it's kind of like pixels but 3d pixels so if i make this very very large you'll be able to kind of see what the deal is by kind of up the resolution and then hide the original object you can see that we now have the object made entirely of of cubes which again i can adjust the size of i can still have the object move these cubes so they're still tied to it it's a little bit slower now because it's voxelizing if i come really close you can kind of see what's happening here so voxelizing is different and interesting in its own way coming back to scatter i now have 20 000 points on this giant taurus donut thing what i'm going to do is use the push along normal and i'm going to push them into a force field so if i come inside here you can kind of see that we are now on some kind of elysium like alien planet type of deal and i can push them into this kind of saturn's ring effect so that is pretty cool so now we have like this wormhole looking thing there's a lot of stuff you can do to me it always reminds me of space but you can get some really cool effects and you can still do a lot of cool things if i take the original geometry the vertices still make a difference so if i use the twist component it'll actually spin them in a ring so you can kind of see they're now orbiting the surface in a cool different way they're kind of coming out of that hole and spinning around the object and that's just geometry stuff you can still go back you can still do all the same stuff with all the nodes you can add a random modifier just to get a little bit more you know debris looking stuff and then if you don't want it to be quite this perfect circular ring that's where you can introduce all of this now you can have this crazy debris orbit field and if you haven't seen the video on making your playblast look like renders you may not have seen that you can use hardware fog which i'm going to mess with the settings a little bit here you can actually use the hardware fog to move through your scene and create this kind of fake foggy depth things that you know if you don't want to move it over to blender or render in an arled you can still get some really cool effects now you've seen some cool stuff that it can do and some more kind of effects driven things let me show you the practical examples of what you're probably going to want to use mash for in your everyday workflow on your short film and your thesis film if you're a student depending on what you're doing these are some of the most useful things that i show to people to say hey this is how it's actually practical to use now at some point i'd love to do a video getting into like all of these and doing like a full training thing on all the nodes so if you would like something like that let me know especially if there's specific things you're wondering about also let me know that there's some ridiculous functionality here so some of the more advanced things are right now it's just using one cube and if i were to have multiple pieces of geometry that i want to have it cycle through randomly or in some order or something you can do that so if i take all three of these and try to put them in a network you'll notice it's just going to use one of them you're not going to see much of a difference so what i need to do is first of all let me crank up that number of points and just reduce the amount so we can see them all what i'm going to do is add an id node an id node allows it to kind of actually pay attention to what's in there right now it's just repeating the pattern i can have it go in a certain cycle i can have it fix just one object and i can have it switch objects very helpful for motion graphics workflows or just random and then adjust the seed until we have a selection that we like you can also have probability so it kind of skews one way or the other if you kind of wanted to have a preference of which objects it's generating whatever you want and beyond that you can do all kinds of stuff i once had some friends ask me they were working on a short film and they wanted to have kind of this this old-timey cobblestone stone floor and they had their modeler spending weeks and weeks and weeks modeling the scene we can do it in about 15 minutes if you just take a few shapes bang up the objects so that they don't feel quite so perfect replicate them randomize them and then just make duplicates of the entire street to create this giant stone looking floor or fallen leaves or whatever this is and you just use a color node to give it that tint randomize the hues and saturations and you're pretty much done it doesn't take long at all you can still make adjustments or make other custom pieces but it's a floor do it really quickly and move on also in the animation classes i do over on patreon i had somebody ask about bookshelves making you know a library full of books which would also take a long time to model generally all you have to do is make one bookshelf make a book duplicate it replicate it and colorize everything you're pretty much done in another 10 minutes people think i'm exaggerating when i say you can make almost anything in maya in under half an hour with the mash system you really can using the audio node you can have any property move based on audio it doesn't have to be scale it can be rotation it can be color really whatever you want [Music] you can use a curve node to have a bunch of geometry follow and animate along a curve you can do cool stuff like this you could do something more for the background of your scene like a multi-lane highway for the background of some city shot obviously you could use real cars instead of cubes to get the same effect to look a lot cooler but you know five ten minutes easy you can use the dynamics mode to take advantage of bullet physics it's actual physics simulator that you can do all kinds of crazy stuff from emitters and new constraints you can have pieces break apart stick together and you can set any mesh as a collider so your character other objects in your scene a sphere whatever you want you can have it kind of break and crash through stuff it's very flexible and very easy to learn i've used it for modeling to create these gems in the breath of the wild kind of zelda trailer thing i made there's a ton you can do with mash and now you kind of have the basics to get started learning so if you want more videos from me on this topic if you have ideas that you'd like me to try and different i don't know things we should tackle once again if you want to see any of this live link to twitch down below if you want to jump into any of my animation tutorials mentoring one-on-one kind of workshop and tutoring as well as a bunch of other educational resources i'll link to my patreon down below if you enjoyed this video please hit subscribe so you don't miss more like it ring that notification bell hit the thumbs up so more people see it share it with a friend all that good stuff either way thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed it i hope you get a ton of use out of this tool just as i have and i will see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 56,482

Rating: 4.9824409 out of 5

Keywords: maya animation tutorial, maya mash, mash tutorial, maya fx, 3d fx, how to do fx animation, easy effects, maya mash audio, mash, maya 2020, maya 2021, maya tutorial, best 3d software, how to animate effects, maya modeling, 3d audio, maya vs blender, blender fx, fx tutorial, maya motion graphics, 3d motion graphics, mograph, maya tips, animation tips, animated short film, make animation, 3d art, make 3d art, motion graphics, animation, 3d animation, 3d tutorial, maya, 3d

Id: QDsSYhUljdw

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020