giovedì 16 ottobre 2014

MDA procedural modelling


Basic workflow with SOUP plug-in in Maya… Procedural Modelling




  1. create a polygonal cylinder and make it thin using the creation node 
Use the creation node and not the trans/rot/scale manipulator or remember in this case to connect the worldmesh instead of the outMesh later in the connection between nodes… outMesh consider the bounding box object coordinates.

2. create a cube and place the pivot at the bottom so to scale it only in the positive direction. model it in the shape of a column.
I moved the vertices up instead of moving the pivot otherwise the scaling would take place from the original pivot in the instances. Doing that you have to be careful of any other edit you'll do on the geo.

3. create an instancer node and place the column inside.

4. open the hypershade and place the nodes we will use in the correct order:
. the cylinder
. a soup group
. a Maya deleteComponent node 
. a soup point
. a soup arrayToDynamicArray
. the Maya instacer

5. make the connections:
. first pass geometry from the cylinder to group
. then pass geometry and components to the delete node
. pass geo and deleteComponents to point
. take the outPositionPP position of points and pass it to the array
. and last connect the outArray to inputPoints.

6. setup the nodes to make the connection work:
. first select the point node and be sure the "use components menu" is set to "input component list"
. then go to position and "enable" it
. into the dynamic array node type "position"

this will make the connections work properly… 

the problem now is that without anymore instructions an instance is placed on every point of the geometry... that's why we need the deleteComponent node.

7. to make it work:
. go to group into component type menu select edges
. the input components menu set to none
. scroll down and create a bounding object
. make it as a cube and size it to fit the cylinder
. place it so that it covers just the bottom f the cylinder.

8. scale the instance node a bit just to make it nicer with the columns inside the cylinder shape.

and here it is… it works

9. we have an expression that drives few channels:
. first the high of the column drives the pipe position y
. the segments of the cylinder drives segments of the pipe and the cone
. cylinder radius drives the cone and pipe radius
. at last a couple of lines to keep proportions of the pipes thickness and column thickness when change the radius.

10. create the asset:
. select the objects you want the channels to be published on the asset
. and press the asset create button in the hypershade
. in the channel box highlight the channels you like and go on edit publish to the asset.


for more infos about Soup plug-in,  Maya Digital Asset and ref materials:
SOuP is a plugin for Maya, originally developed by Peter Shipkov. 


Maya Asset

f

Nessun commento: