Maya Station

Create a rolling fog effect using Maya

Here is a quick video showing Maya users how to create a simple rolling fog effcet using Maya Fluids.

 

How to sample a 3D texture

Sampling the colour values of a pixel on a 2D texture is easy enough in Maya; there is the MEL command 'colorAtPoint', and you can emit particles from a texture and query the RGB values per particle. Sampling a colour value of a 3D texture is not so straightforward, and the approach suggested in the documentation is to bake your 3D texture to an image file and use the aforementioned methods to query colour values on the resulting texture.

In this post, I'll demonstrate how to implement an API function that samples a 3D texture at any given XYZ point, and returns an RGB value.

caching old style particles locally

When using disk caching with the old style particles, you can use the dynExport command.  This command has a path flag, but unfortunately it's a relative path so it will always be cached in current projects.

This works great, unless you have a project on the network and would like to cache locally for faster simulations.

In order to get around the limitation of the dynExport command, you need to edit the current projects.  Under File -> Project -> Edit Current you can set the particle directory to be a local drive.  A full path here works.  Once this is set, the dynExport command will save your cache to the new local directory.

Nucleus Whitepaper

Here is a link to a fantastic nucleus white paper from the Autodesk nucleus dev team:

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/autodeskmaya_nucleus_whitepaper.pdf

Thanks Julia & the team for this great information

Dust Storm By Duncan

A quick and easy way to do a dust storm is to use only the textural aspects of a fluid.

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/duncan/dust_storm

Maya Fluid Effects Dvd now online

Link

Thanks Duncan

nCloth tips - General -6

The relationship between the components and the connections is very flexible because of the componentRelation attribute.  This lets you connect all the components in different ways; first, all to all or daisy chain them together.  

The ConnectionMethod attribute allows you to base connections on the component order, on distance or nearest pairs.

nCloth tips - General -5

Popping and jiggling can generally be helped by lowering the constraint strength (and tangent strength) and perhaps as well by increasing substeps on the nucleus node. As well increasing the minIterations on the constraint can help

nCloth tips - General -3

The links of the constraint are build whenever it gets activated, so on the first frame or when it becomes enabled.  The link rest lengths are defined based on the relative position at the same frame.

nCloth tips - General -2

On the node you can control which elements is selected, they can be based on indice lists or things like “all border edges”.  You can also use points, faces or edges as well as surface for the constraint, but they all link up differently.  When using faces, the constraint will behave like a rigid connection to that face and the rotation of that face matters.  If you use border edges of 2 polygons with a component to component constraint the link will hold even if the vertices don’t line up perfectly.