Maya Station

Create a Tire Burnout using Maya Fluids

Awhile back I was met with a challenge from a customer to create a tire burnout effect using Maya fluids.  Below is the result I got after some trial and error.  While this may not work for every scenario it does allow a user who is stuck get going.  The video describe the process and attributes I used.  

I hope you enjoy it!

 

 

PhysX plug-in for Maya 2013 is available

Nvidia has made PhysX plug-in version 2.72 for Maya 2013 available.   You can download the installer through PhysX Registered Developer Program.

The kind folks at physxinfo.com have made a nice guide for those who run in problems registering for Nvidia's Developer program.

Fixed in Build 2.72.0511.0400:

• Support for 2013
• Support for Viewport 2.0
• APEX Clothing Latch To Nearest system now only support 30 instead of 32 channels. (one is used to represent unpainted and the other is reserved). A vertex may not only receive one L2N channel now in master mode, though backward compat is supported. Coloring is now also more consistent. Black=unpainted, Gray = used by another channel in current drive|latch mode, Light Magenta = used by this channel in opposite drive|latch mode, Dark Magenta = used by another channel in opposite drive|latch mode
• Add solver simulation scaling support to allow simulation to occur (and export) in current or scales units rather than forcing to centimeters (which Maya does naturally in C++ SDK to mesh and transform data not from mplug or mdatahandles ).
• Fix WinXP compatible
• Improve shape's mass/density update functions
• Fix PhysX3 Contact Layer support
• re-enable acceleration joints for new files (more stable than force joints)
• PhysX tab should not gain focus when added
• fix popup viewer crash for clothing
• fix PhysX 3x debug visualizer
• fix some OpenGL rendering errors
• Fix script backward compat issues using -orderedSelection
• Fix minor GUI error message cause by pop-up such as switching PhysX solver versions modes // Error: line 1: Object's window not found. //
• Fix ragdoll load .rag issues when the target bone has multiple children
• Fix ragdoll regeneration creating constraints without removing old ones.
• Fix APEX Clothing import of legacy CTW files flipping latch to nearest data

Cheers!

Nelson

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