Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

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Daniel Brassard
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Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by Daniel Brassard » 13 May 2016, 21:31

For those on Maya 2016 that have the motion graphic extension 2 installed, here is a link to examples provided by Creative Market website.

https://creativemarket.com/apps/maya/examples

Enjoy!

http://www.autodesk.com/products/maya/features/all
Last edited by Daniel Brassard on 01 Jun 2016, 15:21, edited 1 time in total.
$ifndef "Softimage"
set "Softimage" "true"
$endif

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FXDude
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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by FXDude » 13 May 2016, 22:37

Though I'm sure it's good enough to do things, it looks like there can be quite a bit of room for improvement;
"nodes" currently seem to be an unreordable stack of tabs (for one thing)

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.ph ... stcount=28
05-08-2016
Horganovski

Thanks for the new tutorials, going to start watching tonight.

Probably another silly question, but is there an easy way to reorder mash nodes? Say you've created a fairly complex set up but you want to go back and add a noise node to the position of the first distribute node rather than having it affect something further down the chain? I've tried to do this by breaking and reconnecting things in the node editor but it doesn't seem to work.

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And seems to have a long way to go before becoming Houdini (or ICE)

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Mathaeus
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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by Mathaeus » 15 May 2016, 03:39

I don't understand why this mash thing is added, I'm getting these mograph effects by node editor alone:

Image

:D

Yeah, legendary Maya setups, plain reorder is still a category for masters... It seems they achieved best of two worlds, complexity and 'extraterrestrial' approach of Houdini, together with limitations of c4d, hehe. Hard to imagine anyone to switch from c4d to Maya because of this. Anyway I'm pretty sure, people will find how to use it in another area, let's say how particular MASH operator is good to fix some relation between blendshape and skin,if is applied in some specific order, all that in Maya 2019 ext 2d sp3b, while in other version setup goes reverse , or something like.

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MauricioPC
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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by MauricioPC » 15 May 2016, 14:01

That setup almost fried my brain! :D

MASH looks cool ... but it's still "confined" to that tab layout of Maya Attribute Manager which is a pain to use. Of course it's no the same thing, but Particle Flow + Animators toolkit from John Martini is still easier to setup complex motion graphics effects than Maya MASH.

One thing I'll admit ... they at least are trying. Of course they should just bring back Softimage with a Maya skin and call it a day. :))

nodeway

Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by nodeway » 15 May 2016, 18:28

Custom DOP solvers in Houdini, that implements some quantum physics equations, looks simpler than this mograph setup in Maya :D

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by rray » 15 May 2016, 21:16

w00t nice graph.. ICE strands? :D

makes me wonder why they never introduced compounds
softimage resources section updated Jan 5th 2024

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by Mathaeus » 15 May 2016, 23:55

Thank you guys for comments :D

have to admit, intentionally got this creation, by enabling auxiliary node, I think it's Maya Node Editor Info or something, as an 'origin' of all these.... strands. Screen belongs to Maya LT which has no support for containers/assets, while from what I found in docs, one purpose of assets is to hide the content from artists, so not that much of this for one man band, unless someone enjoys in switching the roles, periodically. Anyway Node Editor is still interesting for transforms, hopefully transform nodes are able to exist alone, without extra stuff, typical for deformers. Thing is kind of rigging experiment, btw.

About MASH ws Max Particle Flow, yeah Particle Flow looks like much easier to control, it is completely nodal. Afaik MASH is working as an addition to existing stuff in Maya, including nParticles (particle trails and so on), and... nParticles are controlled today, in same way as it was around 2003 with old particles (when I was learning Maya), by expressions, PP something on creation, PP another at simulation, yet another PP for condition, in short, not easy to build something complex. Too bad, because nParticles have a way stronger solver than Max PFlow, afaik.

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by FXDude » 16 May 2016, 21:55

With;

- MotionTools 1.0 (doc)

- EMTools (doc)
(and/or commercial EMTopolizer)


perhaps together with other things like ;

Dan's parametric equations and Topo Pack
http://traypen.com/rr/bak/brassard/para ... popack.zip (see [url]www.http://RRay.de[/url] for details)

ie; Parametric shapes that can define particle positions (or arrays of geo centers) act as modulators, or volume trigers/switchers, (or whatever)
and that can have their own parametric parameters driven by other ..'procedures'...
Image



LK lighning/LK Fabric (not just for Lightning or Fabric)
http://traypen.com/rr/bak/lk/LK-Lightning-250.xsiaddon

(^ICE tools made with, and expandable using ICE^)

along with other compounds (often working together) or along with the rest of regular ICE nodes to modulate or modify... (also with strands)


... the amount of very (very) accessible creative possibilities that can be very reachably quite elaborate, can simply be unfathomable.
(possibilities which can otherwise be much-much less accessible and/or not nearly as simply made, OR simple/easy but much more limited)

And that is concerning 'motion graphics' alone (and perhaps where it overlaps with all sorts of effects), but which remains a rather partial subsection of what ICE (and or XSI) can be (really) good for.

(Darn corporate greed)


-Maybe- Fabric someday.

(For the time being, perhpas FE should consider tweaking one of the FE info page, until some of those descriptions would be quite a bit truer than they seem now, as it's currently seems -maybe- easier than scripting whatever you're after from scratch, unless doing things like turbulising point positions.)

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by Mathaeus » 17 May 2016, 12:00

Yeah all great, but these belongs to EOL software.... Spending a time on that, anything more than necessary for maintaining the existing projects, seems to be a best way to leave 3d in very near future, together with our lovely SI.
Perhaps more constructive approach could be to create a Houdini equivalent of Gustavo's Motion Tools or something similar. While H of course can do all that, a bit of streamlining wouldn't hurt. Or, Maya plugin (if there is no one already), that works with own nodes, all that presented as just one node in Maya node Editor, in Yeti or Fabric style.

Personally I won't, I think I'll stay on rigging in Maya.

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by NNois » 17 May 2016, 13:07

Mathaeus wrote:Yeah all great, but these belongs to EOL software....
True, plus the big problem in XSI is while all those compounds are great, they do have a feeling of incompatibility between each other, like MotionTools use different island than in EMtools etc, different attributes etc. Plus be aware that in XSI doing Motion Design stuff isn't always end up correctly, starting with Motion Blur or some basic stuff like Caching. I'm passing all the stuff about performance problems...

On the other side all of these tools are way simpler to build using Houdini, plus you can combine things together very easily. Like having a Motion Design style letter animation combined with a FEM solver, it's build in, it's working, it's rendering nearly WYSIWYG, unbeatable...

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by FXDude » 18 May 2016, 01:21

@ Mathaeus
1. Best way to -do- 3D / 2. Best way to -leave- 3D

With all things considered, (in not all, but many circumstances) I think the point number 1 can easily take precedence over point number 2 which can mostly be based on bigger studio adoption, and/or perhaps the same 'bigness' that inclined users towards Maya even pre-2008.

But then or now, in perhaps more practical terms, XSI ...


@NNois
FXDude wrote:possibilities which can otherwise be much-much less accessible and/or not nearly as simply made
Which I think still very much includes Houdini.

With Houdini, while it's possible to go somewhat deeper;

whaterver pro's there may be going for C4d vs Hounini also applies to ICE, except one can still go -- perhaps not AS deep as in H, but still pretty deep while remaining fairly straight forward and fast, enough to say that it has much of the best of both worlds. (not to mention a good deal of Maya's advantages ... in one)

This Ice to H dandelion clip can be a perfect example. (one example)


1h20min and Wow for all that's involved.

And what does that involve in Ice? ;
instance shapes, turbulize orientation, state machine trigger of release of points in sphere, wind, spin particle (?)


And I think the following statement illustrates both the the main advantage AND the main disadvantage of Houdini. (with expression and all the xOPS)
Think of Expressions and CHOPS as the glue for SOPS, POPS, DOPS, SHOPS and VOPS, you use them to put it all together. For example you could in SOPS have a boat you've modeled, and you use a copy sop to do the sails, you might use the stamp expression to have a big sail and than a smaller sail, by using $PT in the variables, you than might use the sin expression to make it sway with a transform or better yet use CHOPS to get really natural movement, in this situation the SOPS is the center place where it's all at, and the expressions and use of CHOPS simply help put it together. Expressions are also useful for making shelf tools, command line rendering and more.
But I agree Hounini isn't EOL.


Otherwise indeed Ice nodes that do the same things don't always play well together (but often don't need to, since one -or- the other is typically used)
and for MB with ICE instances, while it mostly depends on what renderer is used, even if using mental ray, a simple search yeilds a number of rather simple solutions to get motion blur working with non-simulated particle/instance motion, including from yourself ;)
which I personally used a number of times (thanks BTW :] )

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by NNois » 18 May 2016, 09:42

FXDude wrote: But I agree Hounini isn't EOL.


Otherwise indeed Ice nodes that do the same things don't always play well together (but often don't need to, since one -or- the other is typically used)
and for MB with ICE instances, while it mostly depends on what renderer is used, even if using mental ray, a simple search yeilds a number of rather simple solutions to get motion blur working with non-simulated particle/instance motion, including from yourself ;)
which I personally used a number of times (thanks BTW :] )
In nearly every situation with XSI now you need to rely on blackmagic tricks to get the job done. (that's the fault of AD who doesn't solved in depth software problems introduced with ice).
That's simply not the case with houdini where all the things goes togethers.

I don't know if it's the case with the mash plugin for maya, but i assume as every plugin you WILL fall under the case where the thing won't to what you want, the case where you can't bend the software upon you and i don't want that.

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by Mathaeus » 18 May 2016, 16:05

FXDude wrote:@ Mathaeus
1. Best way to -do- 3D / 2. Best way to -leave- 3D

With all things considered, (in not all, but many circumstances) I think the point number 1 can easily take precedence over point number 2 which can mostly be based on bigger studio adoption, and/or perhaps the same 'bigness' that inclined users towards Maya even pre-2008.
Have to admit, 2004 for me, 2 had precedence, between many other reasons, of course. In these times, just wanted to have something enough strong to kill any ''Maya to replace Max" idea anywhere, and XSI FND was great for that, while it wasn't real danger for Max or LW in real life - XSI was just to over-complicated for average Max or Lightwave user of these times.
In case of plain 1, I'll be a happy POV-Ray user at home, until appearance of Blender-Octane connection or something similar.
Today there is different ratio, yeah EOL thing and all that, also perhaps I've studied the ''enemy'' too much, or, maybe I was a Cylon all the time, not even knowing. Doesn't matter, anyway.

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by Mathaeus » 20 May 2016, 12:05

NNois wrote:
I don't know if it's the case with the mash plugin for maya, but i assume as every plugin you WILL fall under the case where the thing won't to what you want, the case where you can't bend the software upon you and i don't want that.
Don't know exactly for MASH. Generally, everything is changeable and non-destructive in Maya, while in practice yes there are nasty habits of not doing the complete updating - refreshing system, at least not directly form GUI. So at the end of the day, imho best way is to take look at docs, what is needed for particular operator. Docs are great there, there's always a clear list of attributes, there's exact chart of what is connectable, storable, has node input, so on. From my understanding, one Maya operator can hold a lot, own cache, own weight maps, whatever.

Regarding 'the case where the thing won't to what you want' - somehow traditionally, when it comes to transforms or real time playback, I think I'd be able to find dozens of examples where Houdini, at the of the day, simply does not offer in same category as Maya or SI (politely to say), so freedom to do everything you want, easily become comparable to freedom of homeless man to do not pay the bills. Let's mention just one of dozens - these days I finally got my preferable rig structure in Maya, after SI and H version, and playback speed of this rig in Maya (quite conservative skeleton of about 200 elements for now, about 100 deformers and about 15k quads for mesh) is about two times faster than in SI, and... about six times faster than Houdini, in best case for H or SI - best case, because Maya shows a very very small slowdown in shaded mode. At this point, I'm ready to forgive Maya for all inconsistencies - even more, if Maya developers would be able to get more speed at price of more 'destructive' operators, I'm buying this option....

By the way, really didn't wanted to go into 'which is better' story. These days, it's possible to get both in some acceptable limited but affordable way, already I have both ( well, small versions). Times never been better for small players....

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by FXDude » 21 May 2016, 00:54

NNois wrote:In nearly every situation with XSI now you need to rely on blackmagic tricks to get the job done.
Perhaps (sometimes), but even then it's still mostly easy(-er) black magic :)


Otherwise do you think they might at some point implement new ways of interacting with nodes?

Perhaps Houdini is just different, but I feel that nodes could be opened up more.

Image


To illustrate, it's as if ICE nodes had only one input for whichever state things are before each node,
nodes which would pick and modify or add their small bit to the whole, perhaps calling their input ports the 'everything' or perhaps the 'previous' port.

Image

Then despite the possibility of different branches (leading to merge or copy nodes),
It would essentially be more like a modifier stack as an interface, except for the fact that some of these
modifiers -could- indeed reference different things, except reference representation, discovery and editing
could only be through individual node inspection. (sometimes within often necessary VEXpression code)

(also as if most of SI tasks were done through that ICE interface.)


While some of these nodes could be like compounds containing nodes that did allow multiple inputs/outputs with visible relationships,
they would be more like isolated compounds where ins and outs could only be though variables/attributes referenced or set to be referenced elsewhere,
but again without any representation of these references for viewing (or generally -over-viewing) from a top level.

And while it's often desirable to collapse functions into nodes, these more granular nodes and or logic
could only exist inside these top level graph nodes that are themselves lined up in strings,
-- and then it wouldn't be exactly as easy to follow dataflow, or decipher what is happening just by 'looking at a tree',
or where things start and where they go, which then 'clarity' would then be entirely dependent on (extra) descriptive node names from the user,
and any node or series of nodes to the next in a single given chain, could easily concern very different things.
(Unlike say treating an image input in a comp tree (dealing only with color) )

Not to mention that functions when 'inside', could only all be very low level functions.

Although such trees can be great for procedural/parametric modeling,
perhaps because they can be more like operators, which is perhaps more akin to compositing.



But what would something with many types of 'data' or aspects like 'shader networks' look like with that paradigm?

Image

In that context, what if different outputs from different steps of say ;
-> a "fractal noise/cloud source + gamma-gain + other node effects" processing tree, were needed in different parts of the overall graph?

Outputs would need to be stored in channels? to then be picked-out from a list? (or remembered?),
especially as processes become more elaborate and many connections start going everywhere.



For actual ICE compounds, they can be like full "digital assets",
but also like tiny breadcrumb tools that have 2 or 3 nodes
(or even a single node to pick most used parameters out of it, make variants with different default settings, reorder/regroup settings .... ).

But weather "breadcrumb tools" of frequently needed mini networks, or full-on 'assets',
they are also just as re-usable in sub-sub graphs or wherever.


Image

Setting Variables (setting data) can also be central to processes, but for most "connections",
just Exposing a parameter is like silently declaring a variable that can be driven by other functions,
with plain obvious identity of that variable in its context in a node, in a tree, with easily followed relationship from that function,
also with clear representation in the PPG ('Attribute Editor') that something is being driven by somethings else,
(dissapearing in ICE, graying-out in RenderTree)
making it easy to reach specific things inside and vice versa, in or out.


Otherwise it seems quite obvious that with Houdini, the capability is there,
and can be heaps and bounds more visual than doing big or small custom things exclusively though python (or mel).

But coming from Soft, it feels that work needs to be done on how what may be there could be more overtly represented,
and less often mostly happenning behind toplevel nodes stinged together in long lines (for the 'ICE part'),
and that interaction could be somewhat more direct (for most other parts).

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Re: Maya 2016 Extension 2 - Examples pack from Creative Market

Post by Mathaeus » 21 May 2016, 22:42

FXDude wrote:
Perhaps Houdini is just different, but I feel that nodes could be opened up more.
If you mean ability to control parameters by connecting the nodes, this is not possible at this (SOP) level. This is already discussed on H forums, usually in not so pleasant way for people who asked.... In H world, it's called 'parallel workflow where you use VOP nodes to construct vex logic to be read in to a SOP at the top'. That 'parallel' part does not exist, yet, while it obviously exists in ICE or Maya.
To be fair, feature is possible inside VOPSOPs or shader nodes, but there's only one 'turn' allowed, let's say VOPSOP is equivalent of just one ICE Set Data chain.

Such system definitively is a problem for making any dedicated system based on factory nodes (or maybe at all), like a bunch of system we already knows in ICE, like Motion Tools, Strand Tree and so on, as it makes very very hard to establish a custom set of modulators - while is possible in similar way how different ICE trees are communicating, it's just hard to do. I found myself avoiding Houdini in any case, where complex network of modulations is needed. This also explains why so many H tutorials are showing a very basic, mechanical style 'art' from 90s - it's simply hard to push it anywhere further than that.

Personally I'm not optimist here, current system seems to intentionally avoids any superstructure, as much as possible, perhaps making it as much clear for coders, not really for final users. It's almost impossible to explain the advantages of mentioned ICE systems to Houdini hardcore users, simply because they don't have almost any of this kind. Plain 'can do everything, where everything is defined by limitations of our knowledge'.

Anyway let's go closer to topic. Imho negative champion is CHOP system (channel, animation operators). In pic, there's sort of hand-made position constraint in Maya and H. As it is noticeable, Maya network directly exposes involved objects, directly exposes connections, all animatable parameters are automatically exposed in Channel Box. No need to specify even parent. No need to type any word, as someone will expects from *nodal* system.
In H, one has to dive into chopnet network first, finding something looking more as as set of flying text boxes. In one flying text box one has to *type* names of parent and target, in another, another typing, where and how data are going - all that to type correctly, of course. 'Node' alone won't tell anything. Possible interface of every parameter involved on object has to be created manually. And of course it's several times slower to execute than Maya. It deals with transforms but does not displays matrices (come on Houdini, Modo does that correctly).

Image

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