Introduction to MASH for Maya

1. Course Promo: Hi guys, and welcome to this introductory course on using mash with Maya. This course is going to be an introduction to how to use mash. We're going to look at a range of different nodes within mash and utilities. And we're going to produce a load of different examples by the end of this course. So to start this course, you'll need a basic understanding of Maya. Nothing too intense, just kind of where things are and the basic layout of Maya, we'll be using the Arnold Render Engine. So don't worry if you don't have Arnold. If you do, then you can follow along with me in the vendor and path. But if you have another vendor engine, then you'll need to use that render engine. Like I said, by the end of this course, you'll have completed a range of different exercises and activities and should be equipped with the skills to go and use mash and develop your own funky animations. Anything that you do create off the back of this course, I'd love you to upload so I can see it and I can give you some feedback. So what are we waiting for? Let's dive on into the course and learn how to use mash for Maya. 2. Lesson 1 - Know the nodes: Hi folks. So in this first lesson, we're going to be looking at a range of different nodes within mash. And we're going to be creating something that looks like this. We're just going to instance a load of geometry and just kinda move it around a little bit. And this will serve as a purpose of just showing you the kind of basics that you need to know for mash. So what you'll wanna do is you want to go ahead and open up Maya, I'm going to be using the Arnold renderer when I do mine. But feel free to use any handy render of your choice. This is the setup that I like to go for. I'll have the outliner is really handy to have the outline on the left, um, and your spective view, and this will be our camera view. So few, a few enlightenment for V or something or one view, just go panels and layouts, two panes side-by-side. And again with the outliner to turn that on, it's just, it's just this button by here. And then we can snap it to the side if it isn't already snapping to the site. Okay, so what we wanna do first of all is make sure our project is set up puppies well, so go to File and project window and then navigate to where you want to save it. I'm not going to do one or I will actually, I'll do a mash. I'll go match the code. And I've already got a mash folder where I've been doing all these projects. But what that's gonna do, it's gonna make a folder in here. And so if I open up this actually you'll be able to see my projects and I've got all these, all these projects here. And it's going to make, if I just click, except it's going to make a folder with all of these folders in there. So let's jump back in and I've now got mesh recall in with all of these. Okay? And all I wanted to do then is go to file and set project and just make sure that we select mesh recording and click Set. Okay, so that's the first thing that we need to do. Now when we save a file, it'll go straight there. Next, what I want to do is I'm just going to create a cube just by clicking that. So let's frame that up. There we go. That's our cube. And what we're gonna wanna do now is we're going to want to navigate to match now mashes, but here, or if you want to go FX and then you've got it here. Okay? And what we wanna do is we want to create a new network. I'm going to click the option box. Okay, so a few things in here. I want to go through geometry type. We're going to keep that to mesh. You would only use instance if you were using perhaps loads and loads of geometry. But for the most part we'll want to use mesh distribution type. We'll go through that and we can give it a name of whatever we want. I'm happy with all less, so I'm just going to click Apply and click X. Well, you'll notice now is in the outliner we've got this new mash network. And then we've got ten of these cubes now. And we've also got an learn stuff over here. So first of all, what's happening is it's taken our original cube and it's basically reproduce in Etsy repro mash. Okay, so we produce a net and you can see over here, we've got a weight of 10 as basically saying we've got count of 10. Okay? What we're gonna do first of all is we're going to go into the Distribute node and have, just have a look through this. So for example, I've got a number of points swiping, click and drag and increase the number of instances. Geometry, they're all we produce geometry. Distance is kind of how her father traveling. So I can maybe zoom out and kinda go chuck a load in. You know, it's pretty self-explanatory. What I would recommend that I recommend just having a play through these yourself. For example, you've got rotate, rotate in y. And so you can just combine some randomness in there, then you can scale it up so as they get further away, they get longer. Oh, let's scale up in the Y. So it's a bit like a graph then. So that's cool. You can offset them. See a kind of game came, what was going on here? We've also got something called distribution type, okay? So you can say distribute them radially. So in a circle. So it increased the number of points and radius, stuff like that, which is pretty cool. Let's go, let's go look at strength. So strength is how much of a radial effect it's having. So it'll go to from none to full circle. And if we went back to linear, it's called strengthen as well as just the strength of how strong what we're doing is. So if I go up like that, there is decrease the number. If we bring down the strength of this distribution, it'll just basically shrink back to 0 so you can kinda grow, grow it up if you wanted to. Okay? So also we've got excited linear spherical mesh. Okay, so what you can do with this is looking at same, Please connect a mesh. So if we've got some gold import mesh here, so if I just go ahead and create a tall us and let's scale that up. Go back to mash. What I can do is I can middle mouse click this torus here. And I'm using my middle mouse and drag into the input mesh, okay? And what I'll do is it'll distribute, distribute this all over the mesh. So. And Canada observes distributed all over the mesh. You've got different methods. So you can say on the vertexes, you can say Flood mesh. And I'll just do all over the mesh and we can hide the original tours. And that's what's happening. Nap for equal. So let's go back. You've got Method, you can Vox allies it, which is basically going to solve, turn it in, you know, use a lot of voxels to do it. So if we turn voxel size down or even play around with these settings and get different locks. Where you can do is if you get your original cube and just scale that original cube down, you can get smaller cubes in. And let's go back to mash and Tylenol voxel size you can get, you can get really cools or pixelated kind of geometry, which is quite cool. So you've also got edge, so you can have them along the edges and stuff like that. Okay? So there's loads of different distribution type types in. What we are going to, is we're probably going to go back and think we're going to go to spherical for this. Okay? Now what I want to do is I've got cube being actually going to delete my tours just as I am and bugs were not need 90. But what, what was going on here is it's basically taking that cube and reproduce in it in this spherical manner. But what happens in my example is I've got a several, OK, I've got some tours in there and spheres as well. So how do we replicate multiple pieces of geometry? Well, let's have a look. So I'm gonna make a little cone, maybe scale it down a touch, and we'll make a Taurus again. Maybe let's toss settings and section radius moving at the point 1, 5, and the radius down to 0.3, Something like that. Okay, Unless have another seven. Another piece of geometry Lascaux for platonic solid. I like them, they're pretty cool. And yeah, okay, cool. Now, what we want is we want the tours, the cone and the Platonic. I'm just going to select them and hit Control H, just hide them. We want these chapter around in here. So if we go to our mash network, we've got mash repro, and what we can do is we can add stuff in. Oops, go back, mash repro, if I middle mouse click and drag the cone and the tours and the Platonic, then it's going to be basically reproduce these, but it's not doing it at the moment. And the reason it's not doing it is because we need to check an ID note in there. So I'm gonna come back to mash but here. And if I go ahead and click ID and an ID node, you'll see it's night we do in it. So basically this is a sign in each of those pieces of geometry and ID number one, number two, number three, number four. And then each instance particle is picking one of those at random. So let's go ahead and say why as also add a sphere in there. We have less atmosphere and scale it down. Now let's get back to the mash and mash repro. And if we just click and drag this sphere in here, you'll see it doesn't get updated. And it's a real simple reason for that. So just hidden that sphere as well. We've got 12345 pieces of geometry in here. If we come to our mash ID node, it's got an ID count of four. So all we need to do is just chuck us up to five, okay? And now we've got some spheres in there as well. It was automatically when we created the ID note earlier, it's saw that there were four in there originally, such as when the four and you can see if I turn this ID down to three, It's only going to do the first three instances, which is a cube, cone and a torus. So let's just change that back to five. Okay, So we've got all that. I think I'm gonna go to my distribute and I'm going to turn this up to 350. Just so you know, some more stuff going on in there. Cool. Okay, I saw unlike in, so next what we wanna do is we want to really start to randomize the, all, all this going on in here. So I'm gonna go back to mash and just come to match here. Also figured a mash mash editor. You can also see all the nodes that you've got. So we've just got distributes which comes naturally and ID. We can go ahead and I think create some stuff in here. Oh, yes, we can create a new note in here. I personally prefer doing it just by clicking mash and community exigency and nice, so a visual representation of them. So I'll add a random node. So come to random, click it, and then click Add random node. And what you've got in here is a bunch of randomization options. So the rotation, for example, on the poll, each of them up to a 180 and it's going to randomize the rotation on each axis. So you can see now they're all completely random or as if I pulled them all back to 0. For example, all of the cones are pointed up and that's just not what we want. So we can do that. We can also, you've got legacy, you've got scale in here. I'm going to turn on. If we do just this one, it does, it owns one access. So if we turn on Uniform Scale, now with this, slider is now going to randomize the sort of scales uniformly. What am I do is I might bring the Platonic. If I go to the original platonic and scale down, it's going to scale them down overall. Safe, the cone, the cones appear quite big. And let's go to the tours, do the same for that. And what that means. And maybe cubic touch. What that means is we can come back into the random node and just, just afford to push the randomness a little bit more. Okay, Cool. Again, I think maybe when the spheres down and photonics and the edges to you just, you just want to play around ready? I'm kind of happy with what I've got there. That's pretty cool. I'm like in that looks interesting. Okay. Well, we wanna do now is this is currently it's intersecting floor and I don't like that. So I'm going to do is I'm going to get to what you can't do actually is you can kind of get this and yeah, No, you can't slice off. So you can't select the mesh and just bring it up. You need to do that with a node. Okay? So we're going to do is kind of mash and then Transform, Transform, Note, and unload, go to the position in the y and maybe bring it up to plus 20. And we go and it's just, it's just brought it up, which is quite nice. Next we're going to add another node. We're going to add a signal note. And this is basically like some sort of 3D noise. So if I just click Add, now if I would stop playing, you can see it's got that noise in there. Whereas if I go back into the mash editor and turn it off, before, we didn't have any movement in there. We just distributed them as assigned them an ID give that gave them random transformations and brought it up in the Y. Now this gives us some animated noise in terms of playing back is sims if you haven't done so simulation stopped before. What you'll wanna do is go into your animation preferences down here and 24 frames per seconds. What I want to work at a could work at 25 frames per second. Actually, I'll mix a bit more sense for me in the UK. In terms of playback speed, you'll want to turn play every frame on and click Save. It may go a bit fast. Jag was very fat. Well, I'm signal on as well. So yeah, who's very, very fast. So I often alternate between player B frame and 25 frames times 1. That's basically real time. Okay? So I'll, I'll kind of alternate between the two. That should have playback. I didn't save as I click Save, and so neither. So play back in real-time, can see asks you for a little bit too fast for me. So I've got timescale in here. Let's put that, I mean a signal note as put that 2.5 and sugar touch slower. There we go. Each time you make a change the animation, you'll want to make sure that you click, go, start, go to Start a playback range. I just, it's just important that So you've got different signal types. You've got looping noise, trigonometry. It's a bit of a weird one. And it uses some sort of trigonometry, basically calculation stuff. Anyway, you've also got curl noise that basically different kind of like algorithms really like 40 noise is the kind of bog standard 10 to 10 to use. Now you'll notice that it's off. It's going to be moving them plus five in the y plus 1 and plus 1 and y in the x and z. So I see what happens if I put this to 25. You'll see that the memorandum movement is a lot more accentuated in the y, the up and down. So I'm probably just going to keep this to five and these 211. So it's mainly up and down movements, but there is some side, side, Let's, let's say put two in nice, they go side to side a little bit more. There we go. Ask That's pretty cool Actually. Yeah, I'm liking that. So you've got loads of stuff to play around with in here. Just, just kind of have a little have a little play through with that. And I'll put sacrament back to 150. It's mainly that sort of timescale. And the stuff in here that I'm using, you got the rotation stuff. You can kind of have a, have a look and play around with that. A lot of this is kind of actually thus has quite nice them skull turn them all up. And just to make sure I'll go back to the beginning and play again. Yeah, That is, that is quite nice actually. And a lot of this comes from just playing around and can see and what, what works. Again, you've got the strength. So if you come down to strengthen, bring us to 0. You'll notice that they don't move. And basically the strength is the strength of this node. So the strength of the signal, if you only want to feel like these settings, but you only want it to move a little bit. Then you can kind of do that. You can obviously key frame this kind of ramp up over time, which would be quite cool. So, yeah, that's, that's the signal node. And then we're going to add a color node. So one mole. I'm just trying to introduce you to very briefly a bunch of nodes. So don't wanna go too much detail into anyone's specifically. But I want to give you a very brief overview of different, different nodes. There's one called color, so click and add color. Note. I'm going to go ahead and give us a bluish color. Favorite color is blue or something like that. And now I'm just going to come into the random hue and introduce some random colors. Or randomize that hue. Just something, I don't want purple in there, just something like that. And I may come back across, maybe bring it a little bit more here. And see if I can push that randomness. Just a touch more. Maybe no 0.94. Yeah. Mask or no, 0.11. Yes. So again, blue in there. Okay. I'm liking that. So this is what we've got so far, which is pretty cool because now we're at a time where we want to render this. But before we do, I'm going to show you how to make a play blast. So let's go to the Animation menu set, come down into playback, and come to the option box or play blast. And you'll get a little box like this. And the format I normally use QuickTime and only good for H.264 quality of 100. And I do it from the window. And basically you can say where do you want it to save two. So if you've set up your project correctly, it's gonna go to mash recording and school movies, the movies folder. So I'm just going to click Play blast. Land is basically going to record it as it's doing that they'll swim. It's a nice, it's a cheaper way of doing a render just to kind of see how it's moving. If you're rendering, it'll take, you know, a 100 times as long with all the calculations is gonna do. So that's how you do a play blast. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you if I were to render this in because I'm using Arnold's, if you use a mental way or something else, then this won't be terroir. I'll split this into another video. And so I'll put this into Video 2. This is our first little Sim, okay? We've kind of played around a bunch of different nodes. Our obscene here, you can kind of turn them off so you can turn the transform off and still play it foo, and you've got that. So it's quite a nice way of work and I really do like this way of working. So what I wanna do is if I were to try and render this now with Arnold, this color, these random colors don't get, they don't get rendered. We need to add some lighting in here. And we need to add an Arnold material onto this actual mesh and that gets rid of the random color. So there's a little bit of a workaround which you've gotta do. So in the next video and show you how to actually render this. Now to actually render this simulation out using Arnold renderer. Okay, So chief tune, and I hope you found that helpful and I will see you in the next tutorial. 3. Lesson 2 - Rendering our Simulation: Okay, So we're back in the next video and I'm gonna show you how to render this simulation this time. Okay, so we've got up to view setup. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna create a camera. And in this view, I'm going to go Panels Perspective and look through camera one. So I'm just pull out like this. And yeah, there we go. Just move out. And one would do is I'm gonna go to my Render Settings. I'm going to, I'm just gonna do the common tab first four. So an oil change at a tiff compression is going to be none. All fine for that. I know that later on when we venue in an image sequence, soldiers put name underscore hashtag and I'll be doing frames 1200 streams to a 100. So put that in here. So when I do later render, It'll do frames one to a 100. Renderable camera will become a one. And preset, I'm going to do HD 1080. Okay, So think that's everything I wanted. The common tab I normally render with my GPU. So I'll just turn that on. And yes, fine. What I'm going to do now in this view is I'm going to go to View and I'm going to go to camera settings, resolution gate. And basically this will then show me this will be the renderable areas. So I just want to make sure I frame it up. Nice. Let's have a quick playthrough. Nothing goes out of frame, something like that. I think that's pretty cool. Okay, cool. So that'll be the renderable area. What I wanna do is I want to make a floor plane and scale it up. So in work in a perspective view, but I'm only concerned about how it looks in this pbar here. So I'm gonna make this a little bit bigger, so scale up and oneth floor to go there. Yeah, cool. And what I wanna do is I want to find where's this edge? This edge right here. So it's right. There we go. So I want to select this package, click there and then hold Shift, double-click there. And I'm gonna hit Control E. And then I'm going to bring this extrusion up like that. So I'm basically making a quick little moon really. And I get this object, I'm going to right-click assign new material and I'm going to give it a Arnold AI standard surface. I like, I really like the plastic, really do like this plastic texture. I scroll. All lovely said engineer. So I'm just going to play around and get a little bit of a yes as as fine. Maybe I'm a lot lighter blue because blue going on in those particles, it doesn't matter, doesn't really matter too much to you. Or maybe I'll give it a bit of a, a purple line. Okay, Cool. Don't anything too much of an ISO. You can play around and do whatever college you want, really continue. Next. We're going to want to give it a light because if we go to Arnold and open Arnold render view. And if we were to say right, render the camera. When refresh render, it's honestly it's not going to do in the assay warning, no light in the scene. So what only use is the Arnold lights, sky dome light. And now that's plot. You'll see a sky dome around it. So let's go back to the Arnold render view. And that is gone. Let's just open up and let's refresh the render. And this is what we've got. Which one are you in at first? But don't worry, like I said in the previous video, it's not going to render. Let's just add an imager. I'm just going to add a d noise or optics. And I'm going to vendor again, this is if you're doing GPU rendering or it may work a CPU Andrew, and I'm not sure, but it just gets rid of the noise. Okay. Don't worry if, again, if I'm less our quick check, does it do it in CPU rendering? I would have thought it would actually select Render again. Yes, just gonna take a lot longer. And yeah, I'd just like to add in that image are there because it just gets rid of all the nasty noise. And I'm actually going to hold escape because that takes far too long. So I'm gonna go back to GPU. Okay, right, so we've got the issue of saw in Moscow in arm with these things. But here because this isn't an Arnold material on old, isn't picking it up. So what we've got to do, and he's got this mesh, assign new material. Let's give it an Arnold material and AI standard surface. I love the plastic. The plastic. So let's put plastic on there. But when it comes to color, we've got to do a few things. So let's go back to mash, repro mash, okay, come into the mash repro Nash shape. Go down to Arnold and what you'll wanna do is enable export a vertex colors. Okay, also come across to mash 1, underscore repro, just this tab bar here. And just make sure any output attributes that color per vertex is enabled. What we'll wanna do now is we want to go back to the material attributes, the material we put on there. Come to the color input and click that little checkbox. Come down to Arnold. So click there and I want you to type in the word data and its user data color, okay, so click that and you want to type in color set with a capital S. Okay, so now if I click off and do another with my Arnold render view, another render, Let's save this one's less. Take a screenshot timeline and let's do refresh render. What you'll notice now is that color is coming through, okay? Now, what's going on is that little thing that we've plugged into the color by here. You know, we enabled color per vertex. It was looking at the vertex is on here and looking at what color was assigned to end, basically it's doing that. Okay? So that would be how we go ahead and render this. So if I go and where's my get my RenderView backup. We can now render the sequence, and this is what we've got now think MAN life tins a little bit too strong. What I would do as well before I render, I would certainly be going into the Render Settings and bringing up the camera AAA to about, let's say eight. Okay, let's take a screen shot to see the quality difference. And let's do new render. And basically it's going to really bring up the quality. And I'll also give you a little bit of a kind of run through. And if you're using CPU and drink, it's ever so slightly different. Not that much different atolls, nothing to really worry about. But if we have a zoom in like this before, and this is after now, it's just the quality. I have changed the frame unfortunately. So that's why things move in about, but you can see nasty, nasty kind of edge quality there. But it's got a lot nicer edge quality. Okay? So that's, that's kinda what that's doing. And I'd been more happy to render that. I think what I might do is I may come into the sky dome light and bring the light intensity down to 0.5. Let's give that another. Where's it gone now? Another vendor. So save the screenshot from before and refresh that. Okay, Maybe it's a bit too dark, so it's escape and bring it up. Points 75 split the difference. Open, not refresh, render. Cool. And I saw on 45 percent. So it's looking good. Let's just let it previewing and we'll compare it to before. I think that's kinda, kinda be a keeper though. Yes, but to brighten, Yes bit nicer. Cool. So the only thing left is if you were using the C that I'm using, I'm using GPU anderen and you can't look at the diffuse specular transmission, subsurface scattering and volume and direct. You can't do them separately. You with GPU rendering is just the camera AA. But that does, as you do the camera AA, it does increase the samples of spec transmission to fuse. So you'll see as I pull my camera AIR, it actually does increase those samples. If you're rendering with CPU, then you'll have these individually secret. You can do them individually. So, you know, if you're getting some sort of nasty noisy and even with the de-noise and then you'll just want to bring up the diffuse. But yeah, all the camera AA as well. But like I said, I'm sticking to GPU renderings. I've got a nice graphics card. And what you'd be ready from here is you'd be ready to go rendering vendor and then render sequence. And it would start rendering out your sequence. And you will hopefully be finished with something that looks similar to mine. I've just got different colors in there. Okay. So yeah, I hope that you found that useful. Looking at mine, actually, I just had I had more specular on mine and it's probably because I went with the def I didn't go with a plastic last time. So if I open Arnold RenderView again, I haven't got that much specularity on mine. So what you could do is let's just assign, assign new material just to get them all shiny. Let's just go Arnold. Ai standard surface. Let's go back to the color and we want to plug in that data. Then we use a data color and color catalysts for set. And we can go back to the material attributes. We've got a specular quite high now. So let's go and again, save the last one. And vendor refresh render. And hopefully we'll have a bit more specular kind of going on. So I thought we didn't have specular but we have got specular going on. It's just the light that we're using is very, very flat. So if we were to change out the sky dome light for, let's say Arnold, lights and physical sky. Let's now do a render and I'm sure you'll see some nice reflections. So as open that up and do another render, refresh render and DAC in some more poignant reflections in there and some soft shadows on the floor. Anyway, I hope you find that useful. I hope to see you in the next lesson where we'll be looking at making something a little bit more cool hopefully. So give that a render out, and I'll see you in the next lesson. Cheers. 4. Lesson 3 - Dynamics: Hi guys, Welcome back to another video. Now in this exercise, what we're gonna do is we're going to look at something called dynamics within within mash. And we're also going to look at how we get our mash network to interact with other objects. And we're also going to have a quick look at something called constraints. So I'll just play through what we're going to be making today. So we're just going to be making for us. We want our geometry to kind of, we want these to bounce off each other. And we want them to kinda like in tracking someone else, we got these cool little constraints kind of thing was given on here. So that's what we're gonna be making. So let's jump in and let's get on with it. So like, like in previous lessons, I have my Maya setup with my outliner here and then two views, just like in the first lesson. So if you want to know how to set how I set that up, then just go back to that first lesson. So what we're gonna do is we're going to create a cube. We're going to go across to mash, whether that's in here or in the effects. And we're going to go and create a mash network with that selected. Okay, now next, what we wanna do is we want to go and distribute this. So go into the Distribute node, which is the default one that you get. And I'm going to go for grid. Okay? So what I'm gonna do Ang would go, I think five by five by five. Okay, so just distributed knees in a little mice grid like this. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add a transform node. So come into here into mash transform. And I think I'm going to put it up by about plus 20 in the y. So basically just lifted up off the ground. Next, I'm gonna go back to my mash node and I'm going to add a dynamics node. And this is a really, really cool one. So click and then add dynamics. So let's go and see what happens if I just go ahead and click Play. You'll notice that now there's gravity and these are starting to fall. And they interact with this ground plane and they all start kind of falling all over the place. Which is quite nice. We got a few issues. It looks like it looks like ice on the floor. There's absolutely no friction and also the floor is a little bit too far down, you know, why is it down there? Why isn't it on the ground plane? So few things that I like to do. I'm going to go into the mash One Bullet Solver over here. And Collision Iterations, I normally put this to 12, just basically the quality. And you've also got friction in here. So I'm going to go and say why? Let's have a look at what 0.6 to eight. Let's go back to the beginning and hit play. And I want to see how far they're kind of like falling, still far too much. Let's pull out a one. And let's pull out the beginning. Cash is still a bit much. So let's go to three. It's kind of see is click Stop and see what that's going to do. We may need to go a little bit higher. Let's go to, let's say for the friction, I'm going to go say sex. And it stopped and go back to the beginning. See how much that affected. There we go. So that's a little bit better. So I think six seems to be a good value. So they do slide a little bit, but just not too much. Okay. I'm just going to stretch this out and make sure to 100 and 200 is in there just so I've got a longer, just we have got a longer, longer playback. I'm going to want to go to the ground. And the ground by default is set to minus 20. So we just want to put that at 0 and go back to the beginning. So now the ground plane is actually on the ground. Okay, so that's what we've got going on by there. So we've got some nice dynamics going on, which is quite cool. But let's see. Let's have a look at how we kind of make this interact with another object. Notice in the mash bullet solver, we've got this menu collider objects. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to Windows and general editors and content browser. I'm going to go and get this head. So it's just in the modeling, sculpting base shapes look into bipeds but here, and just click Basic head or double-click. And now we have our head, which is quite a lot bigger. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and I'm going to scale it down. Just kind of roundabout. Say Bears, let's just move it up a touch this up off the floor. Maybe scale it down a touch more. And there we go. Let's come back to the beginning. So they could probably do with being moved up a little bit. So just come back and just go to our mash editor and go to the transform. And I'm gonna put this to say plus 40, or maybe too much plus 30. So they start quite a bit higher. Now. And well for foo for the moment. So what we need to do is we need to go back into the mash Bullet Solver. And I'm going to get c collider objects. It's as I hover over, it says accepts and it's, it accepts mesh, mesh object. So I'm going to get my default basic head. First of all, click back in a magic bullet solver, middle mouse click and drag that into here. Okay, so if I go back to the beginning now, let's have a look what happens. Brilliant. So we've got them all kind of interaction with each other, which is quite cool. So it's quite instantly kind of pile up on each other by day, which is quite fun. So that's kind of how we get that basic interaction kind of happening. So what I wanna do is I want to kind of adjust a few more things now. So I'm going to go back into distribute. So stop the simulation. Let me go back into distribute. And the thing I'm going to distribute as a sphere, because that feels a bit nicer. So I'm wanna make that radius down and the number of particles up to say something like a 150, someone who knows 1550, maybe make the radius a touch bigger. There we go, some of my bath pretty cool. Okay, so we've got accurate nouns. Let's have a quick preview of that. Cool. So what we wanna do now is we want to add a constraint, okay, maybe I may come in and bring the radius down to five. So let's just pause and go back. Yes, curve. That's kinda looking quite nice. Okay, so if we go back into the dynamics, what we wanna do is we want to come down to constraints should be in here somewhere. And what we can do here is right-click in the empty box and click Create and that's going to create a constraint. Now if I double-click this now, you can see we've got glue. So let's have a quick preview and you'll see we've got these lines. So let's have a look at what collude as us give the app could play. And the kinds of all glued together. So one did get knocked off. But Yeah, we've got this. So we've also got connection mode connecting nearest or connect to the ones that touch in. So let's have a quick thing of that. So go back to the beginning. And so the only going to connect to the nearest ones now, okay, So almost like in clusters, which is quite cool, connects 2. So let's, so the point is by default on the floor. So this is kinda what was happening, that kind of just glued to that point and they don't really fall. Because because of the nature of that blue connected to offset pointless. I haven't actually used that one before. And see what happens doing. Okay, you'd probably have to go in and play around with a few settings, but let's have a look at spring. This is quite a good one. I do like the sun. So connect to the ones that touch in spring. Let's go back. And okay, it's a little bit different. Connecting nearest spring connected Nero's less. Go back and have a look at that one. This is quite cool. Nice. You can also make these breakable on K. So let's go back here because they're all sticking together at the moment. But if we make it breakable, That's kind of see what happens now. So they can break away from each other. And you've got this threshold, which kind of says basically how easy it is for them to break away from each other. So let's, let's pull it all the way up and kind of see what results we are going to get from that. It's all about experimentation. So they're really not breaking away from each other. But if we put it in really low, they are breaking away with each other from each other. Okay. So those are some of the, what you'll wanna do is you probably, there's also some engineer called slider. I really haven't played that one that much. So let's have a look and see what results we're getting from that. Okay. And like I said, Do you just want to kind of, do you really want to play around with these and just see what different results yet a law, a lot of the stuff which I've done in Masha, the law of it is come from kinda like playing around and just just kind of yeah, just playing around and see what results I got. I know that in the example I was kind of like in I often use spring. I always like them to be a little bit breakable as well. Connect in the US. So I think let's go back and see. Think of May. Yeah, breaking a bit too easy. So I'm gonna bring the threshold up to say 1.6 has played. I can break in just a little too easily. And maybe even going out up to three, see what that looks like. And give it another play. Maybe 2.5, I think two points. Let's get to 14 and back to the beginning. Cool. Yeah, some random enough for me. I'm, I'm like in Moscow, in on there. So what I wanna do now is I actually want to add a color nodes just to give them some random colors. If I open up my example and I'll try and match the colors I got going on here. Okay, So I've got school. That's sort of orangey thing. And it looks like I've got more of a sort of very high a break-in threshold in that one. So let's bring it up to 3.5. Just to kind of try and match as best we can. Just they stick together a little bit more. Yeah. I like that they're getting caught around him is pretty cool. So let's go back to mash and I'm going to add a color node. I'm going to go four terms. I'm going to go for a red or maybe an orange, kinda like that. And then bring that random hue up, starting to introduce a little bit of green there. So let's bring it back down. Maybe bring it over into the veils bit more and then increase this. Okay, Cool, happy with that. Although I wouldn't bring the saturation down. Touch something like that. And you can random, randomize the saturation if you wanted to. But I don't tend to like doing that. Cool. So that's cool. Well, I'm gonna do is I'm going to very briefly touch on, you've got different kinds of node in here. So if we go back to mash and let's get our mash editor. You've got something called utilities down here. Basically, nodes can be ordered so you can change the order in which things take place, so you can kind of move things around. But the color bottom for whatever reason, for the transform of a top back now. And color back at top. There we go. Yeah, nodes you can order with these, with, with color. You can order as well, but with utility. So utility is, you can't. Okay? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make a utility. They won't pop up here. So trails and add trails node. And if you ever want to get to it, just this little button here. It'll show you the utilities that you've got. So Bullet Solver being one of them and trails be any other. So we've got this all looking quite nice. But the problem is when we come to render this, these little yellow lines which look quite nice, these yellow lines, if we try select them, luck there not a mesh. So what we wanna do is these, these basically one side is these won't show up in the render. So a little bit weird if there wasn't anything there because you like, how are they say in together, there's nothing holding them together. So what we're gonna do is we're going to go into mash. You'll notice we've got these utilities down here. And the reason I utilities and not nodes is if I get my message to these nodes, these are, these are things which can be reordered so your color can come first before your transform or stuff like that. And when you've got more complex stuff going on, you may need to, you may see changes if you have dynamics before transform and stuff like that, especially if you've got key framed thing in the transform. So utilities because of the way they work, they can't be ordered in different orders. So you can get your utilities by going here. You can see we've got mash 1 trails can think of already maybe over the main one and bullet solver shape. But if we just come into mash by here, you can also see them down here. So I'm going to click trails and I'm going to add a trails node. And you'll notice it doesn't pop up in here. Okay, It's in here. So Mash Trails one is the one that I want to look at this I did one earlier. You'll just be called Mash Trails. And you'll notice we've now got Mash Trails mesh. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning and let's just play it through something like this. You'll notice that we've got these meshes, this mesh now. And actually, yes, It's currently set to trails mode is currently set to trails. So it's actually pull it and making these trails behind it. Now, I don't want that. I mean, you can make the trails longer. So let's play it again. You can make the trails longer or you can have more of them to trail length and you can have or you can have more of them, stuff like that. If you adjust these, you may have to be simulated again. But you've got all these different options, but here the scale of them. So you know, if you want and thicker oh, I spit mental. But yeah. So you've got loads of stuff in there. But you've also got different modes. So join the dots, connect, appoint. Another one I'm going to go for is I think the one I'm going to go 4s probably going to be joining the dots. So let's kind of have a lock. Basically, what we will see is if we click Mash Trails mesh, you'll see that there are no lines within here. And what we'll probably want to do is, let's go back to my shales one. I want to make a little bit thicker so it's fine. Join the dots trails scale. So I want to make them a bit thicker, something like that, maybe 1.3, something like that. And so you will actually be able to render these now we can apply material to it and that'll be all good. So that's quite cool. Now, yeah, I think that we don't wanna do count. We can increase count. Not gonna do much a tree and just leave it like that. So 1, I'm going to burn to Africa 1.4. So we have got something that's actually renderable now. Okay, So what we wanna do now is we want to start add in where we've got color. So we want to start the rendering process. And so I'm very much like we did before. What we're going to want to do is first of all, click Create camera. Change this view to the camera, start to pull out something like that. Now let's go to our common tab. Change back to the Arnold renderer. Go teff. I'm going to go name underscore hashtag because I'm gonna do one to 200. When I render it. I want to make sure that it's Camera 1's renderable HD 1080. And that's all that I know that I prefer to render with my GPU. And I'll put the AAA up to about, I put it up to six for now. I may increase that as I rendered depends. So if I come back in here, I want to go to View camera settings, resolution gate. So I know, right, let's go back to the beginning. So that's where it started and may want to frame it. So just kind of stand outside and then it comes in. This comes down. And there we go. So let's, let's play that again. Actually. Let me go to 200 as well. Just let it settle. And let's pull this out just to see the foramen. Yeah, I think we could afford to go in and touch more. So going like that. Perfect. Okay, I framed nice. So I'm going to lock this camera so that, that now what we can't move. Okay? And what we wanna do is we want to make a ground plane. So click that, scale it up. And that's cool. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to the edge mode and then Shift double-click and Control D or Command D on a Mac. To bring this up. There we go. So we've got a nice little room. And now I'm going to go to add a light. So go to Arnold. If you add a skydiver will have soft light in soft shadows. If you add a physical Skylab, harsh light in harsh shadows, and obviously harsh reflections then. And they're both good. I'm going to go for just soft layer for this. So sky dome light. And now I can open up my Arnold render view and give it a quick render cam shape. We refresh and let's have a look at what we've got. I don't know why that always did that often defaults to go to that long view. So let's refresh it again, and let's go back now to camera shape and now it will do it. Yeah, That's weird. Okay, so we can see that mesh is coming through, but everything is a little bit gray scale at the moment. So let's go and add a new material. And it's going to be AI standard surface. And what was the color I went forward if it was blue wasn't it slips go presets. So I like that one and keep it blue. Thing, that's fine. So let's go. Also, we want to get this, get these sort of these square squares. So we mash easier. And again to rent because we're using the color node like in the previous example. It's not going to automatically render the, it's just going to render it Quakers, it needs an Arnold material. So what we'll do is we'll assign a new material. And again, it'll be an AI standard surface. And what we wanna do is go back to the repro mash. Go into the Arnold tab of the week for mesh shape. Make sure export vertex colors is ticked. Come into mesh one repro, make sure we should probably is that yeah, color per vertex ticked. Now if we go back into the AI standard to the material which is on these cubes, we want to go into the color node. And if we click on old and just type in data, we want AI user data color and type in color sat with a capital S. And if we were to render, now let's open Arnold RenderView again. So let's save this screenshot. I'm also going to add a de-noised optics. And let's do a refresh of the render. And right, so we've got the color coming through. This is still gray, so I'm not sure why I must have done something wrong. But that's a nice render, actually nice stuff coming through their love and the shading service go here. Let's go Object Mode, material attributes. Okay, I didn't assign it, so assign existing material and it was AI standard surface one. So that's bad. And this, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to assign new material. I'm going to give it obviously an AI standard surface. So Arnold, Standard Surface presets are gonna go for clay, I think. Was that play thing. That was why I went for last time and maybe just make it a bit brighter and maybe more desaturated, someone like that. Although that may be too similar to the colors on there. Let's give this a render and see what we got going on. So I don't like all this or shine on the refresh. This is kind of where we're at now. So let's just let that preview into 50%, nearly done. And then the denoise or we'll kinda do its job. We should have something that's quite nice there. So we've come from there to there. And the only other thing we wanna do is we want to add a material on this mesh. Now, let's have a look. What color do I have? It was yellow, isn't it? Yeah, cool. Okey-dokey. So let's come back out. Let's go down. Mash Trails mesh. So we'll just right-click, assign new material. Let's go for Arnold Standard Surface presets. Let's go plastic again and replace. And let's just make this yellow and let's make sure there's no other stuff going on. And here, i, we might want to make this yellow with, well, I should probably do that for this one. The AI standard surface because I was a plastic. Otherwise that's fine. Okay, Let's give this a final rerender now. And we should so when we refresh, we should have yeah, we've we've got our yellow lines coming through which is looking quite cool. So let's just let that kind of finish up. And there we go. That's looking quite nice now. So what you would then do is you would just go ahead and go to rendering and render when the sequence, and you've got another little animation done. If you wanted to, you could do a play blast of this. So let's say it was go to animation, playback, play blast this number here. That's then go, right. We wanna do it for the whole time slider. Let's go QuickTime H.264. Quality of 100 scale is one. And it's called playlist to unless play blast it. And hopefully that will run through it now. And it will give us a nice sail play blast of that. So at least we can see it polymers because we've got our old material on it in here. Now not showing us the actual colors, the true colors, the Omega, you know, it kind of is released. And then we've got this plate glass, we can see exactly how it's working. So it's nice you could send that off to like a soft supervisor and say, Look, I'm not going to render yet, but this is how the Sims look in. Uh, can you give me the go-ahead to render? So we learned some stuff in that we looked at dynamics and we looked at the trails option and constraints. So covered a few new things. Looking forward to seeing you in the next session where we'll be having a look at a few more things. And yeah, we'll be making this little thing right here. So, yeah, looking forward to seeing you in the next session. Cheers. See you then. 5. Lesson 4 - Using Custom Paths: Hi folks, welcome back to another video. So in this one we're going to be making something similar to what I've got going on here will probably look a little bit different because I just get different results each time really, I just play around if I find something else that looks a little bit cooler. And that's kinda like the beauty really is just such a creative application. So let's jump into watchman, call it maya. And if you've got the name of the program and wanna do that and start off by making a sphere. I'm just going to scale it down, just something like that just to make it smaller. And then I'm going to go to mash and create mash network. We've got a bunch of spheres. So to illustrate a 0.1 of all, what we'll do is I'm going to get this little pencil Curve tool. And if I kind of go like that, what we can then do in the mash network is go curve, AD curve node. And look, it's asking for us to input a curve here. So middle mouse-click curve one. And this is what we've got if we go back to the beginning, It's not really what we want. So if we come to mash distribute, what you gotta do is set the distance x to 0. And now they will all be going along that curve. Can remind you of the game snake if you ever played that. Okay, so let's go to the curve node options. We've got step which kind of let you space them out. And we've got animation speed, which funnily enough slows down your animation. You can sort of add some sort of variation into that speed or not into the speed, so it into the distance that they are from each other. Okay, So just to add some sort of variation in now, just pretty cool, velocity randomness. So you can, this is the actual velocity of them and you can randomize that. So maybe some Argo and a bit faster. And you'll notice some of them may start taking each other over velocity noise. So you can put basically, I think the best thing really focuses to play around with these settings and just get something which is kind of looking quite cool. And you can go back to the mash distribute, increase the number of number of points on there or particles, whatever you wanna call them. But yeah, that's kinda of like we can also, like I said, Actually, let's go and add a random node. Because you can do that. And let's stop this and refresh it. Because sometimes yeah. Sometimes if you add something and yeah, going to have to delete that from the editor. Sometimes if you add a node with its still play and it just won't register. Poppy. So let's go back and cool as what we've got to stop it, put it back to the beginning, and otherwise, otherwise might respond like it. Okay, so let's add a random node again. I'm going to, I'm going to stick with what we've got. And what we can see. This is not they're not strictly stick into that line and you all, so you can turn on Uniform Scale, have like different scales in there. You want to scale down the original sphere. And then that's pretty cool. So go back to the random node to know why it's not popping into that. Sometimes it doesn't. You just turn them all on and off its usage to willow bark again. See I can kind of if you had some cubes, you can do the rotation, but isn't really not going to do much. We could get a position y and that's kind of the randomness of the why. But, you know, we've used all that stuff before. So another thing we can do is just make sure back to the beginning is going to add a signal and that signal node. And let's give this a little pages. We can see what it's doing and it's kind of add in that sort of random sort of movement in there. Okay, come to the signal node, we've got different types of noise which we've looked at before. So curl, I'm just going to keep it for the noise. And then upwardly putting the randomness of the y position times row 3 to the given a bit mental and cool. And you can randomize the scale if you want. So randomize database to the scale may fluctuate and some of them, which is pretty cool. Awesome. So I don't like this curve. So I'm going to not delete it. Delete it. And then what we can do is go back into the mash curve and it's looking for one again. So I'm gonna go to the curves and click a circle and then scale it up. I'm going to rotate it to all do and channel box, I can do exactly 90 degrees. And I'm also going to bring it up off the floor. Okay? Now let's go back into mash and into the curve node. And we're going to click and drag that nurbs circle. So there we go. It's kind of go and across that. And that was a bit fast. So let's go back. I ever because it's a different, it's a shorter path. So come back into the curve and take the animation speed down to a script point to still quite fast. Let's go. Yeah, 0.02 in here. And then this should be a lot slower. Cool. Unlike in that. Excellent. So that's what we've got going on there. Now what we may wanna do is yeah, the sum of these, Let's have a quick zoom in. I'm sure this will probably be happening so much. Yeah, look at these, these are intersecting mass, not good. So we want to stop that so they bounce into each other rather than insect. And the way to do that, let's go back to the beginning. And you can still see that they're going to bump into each other over here. So what we can do is go to mash and we're going to add a dynamics node. And you might think, first of all, what you're doing. Because when we play it now all fall to the floor. But at least they do kind of like bounce off each other. So what we can do in the mash bias is positioned strength to it all the way up to a 100. And so that will basically override its primary position. Now overrides the, the sort of gravitational position. So now if we play it, basically what'll happen is if they bounce into each other, they'll just be dynamic of each other. So, yeah, that's cool. What I also do is in a bullet solver, I'll always turn the iterations after about 12. And it binds really high up if you wanted to, I probably wouldn't do. Okay, so what I also wanna do is I want to get my sphere and make that quite small. So the spheres are going to be quite small. And what I wanna do is I want to make a platonic solids. Maybe even inside of that don't quite touch that. I want to go to mash and I want to go to the repro mash repro. And I want to drag in this platonic, solid, but like religion previous lesson is not just going to pop in automatically. We need to add an ID node. And that will by default code too, because we've got two pieces of GEO. And I'm just going to get that and make them, I want them to be slightly bigger than the spheres. So run about math and maybe the spheres can be a touch bigger, something like that. And I think I'm gonna go to distribute and I'm going to check the amount up to maybe 70, maybe double at CR. That's kinda look in. Yes, quite nice. I like that. It's quite different. Why Virginia? But you can see there were bouncing off each other. Let's have a look and see if we can do anything more with the randomness. Let's go to random. They were famines by 55. Kind of have a locker. Oh, ask, gonna look a bit mental or to their mind. Do still kinda like it, but it's bit too much in it. Let's go for 222. Yeah, I'm kinda like an asked us interested in as really interesting. Okay. Let's go back. Let's add, I know the ones I had with blue. So let's add a color, node, add color, and it's been doing this. It's been bugging out what Beth some reason the colors and show up. I know that it doesn't really matter. We're going to be doing is to Arnold anyway. So I'm just going to add a, an atom blue. And I'm just going to turn the random hue up to 0.1. And we can kinda see I must work in later anyway, but it is a bit weird that it's doing us annoying as well. Okay, so let's have a look at our editor. So as our mash editor, click OK, well on nodes going on there now. And we want to do one more. So let's click mash and C utility that we want. So we can either go in there and do a utility or we can just go trails at trails node. Make sure you go back to the beginning. And let's just click Play and see what happens. Because, yeah, I'm really liking that. I am really liking that. The one I went for my example was connect the dot o, join the dots. Which to be honest, as kinda quite nice as well. But in all honesty, I'm kind of prefer in what I had. So I'm gonna go back to trails because it just it just looks a bit cooler and yeah, cool. I can go trail length or may bring it down to 15 and max trails. Well, we've only got 70 odd pieces of geo in that SAS fine trail scale, we may want to make it a touch larger. Sum of i 1 point to decay trails. Not quite sure us all look, I think that just makes them so decay off a little bit faster. I have a play around with that and use that in a lot of detail. But this is looking pretty cool. I'm really liking what's going on here. So it's time to start rendering edges. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go across and I'm going to click Create can camera. I'm going to change this view to my camera view. Command. Line this up, something along the lines of that. Let's go to my rendering settings and change it to none name underscore hashtag because they'll be two in frames 11 to 200. The camera is going to be camera one. I wanted to be HD 1080, and I want to use my GPU to render personally, and I'll start off with six. Cool. So let's go ahead and create, or let's first of all, famous better camera settings, resolution gate. So we got a lot of wasted pixels basically by here. So let's play this. And let's just zoom in and frame itself fills the whole thing. Maybe given a little bit. Cool, I'm liking that. So I'm going to lock this camera view. And I think let's add a floor. Like that. Let's go and over two planes in certain other one, okay, to leave town. So until the plane one go. So let's get the edges of this. So let's get there and Shift double-click Control E to extrude upwards. And I'm going to go to object mode and assign new material. I'm going to go on old AI standard surface go presets is going to be plastic because I liked that material. I'm going to go full on wiped and come down into the subsurface and go to full on white. I'm then going to go and select my repro mash. I'm going to right-click and go to assign new material. I'm going to go to Arnold. I'm going to go AI standard surface. And then what I wanna do is I want to go to where it was a repro mash on old export vertex colors and mesh one reproaches, make sure output, yeah, colored by vertex is there. And then we want to go back to the material attributes, come into color. Go click on old data or type in data, then user data, color and type color set with a capital S. And then I want to go to trails mesh. Right-click, assign new material, Arnold, AI standard surface. And then I go and give it a plastic material again. And I will change that to yellow and the subsurface again to a yellow. So now that we've got our sorted, I'm going open up my Arnold render view, um, which is over here. And this is what I was doing earlier with you in an earlier lesson. So let's get rid of that and let's, let's render and make sure we've got camera one. And let's do a render and see what we got going on. And hopefully we've got some nice kind of star. We haven't added a light. That's why. So I'm gonna go for faculty on old, I think I'm going to go for physical sun and sky. Just a may give us some harsh shadows on the floor, but I just want to kind of get the sort of nice plasticky highlights. So if I go physical sky, now if we do a render, we'll see what we've got. Cool, okay. What I needed to do is I needed to add a image urges to get rid of that noise. So I'm going to do another quick render with the noise of optics. So let's refresh that render. And yeah, I'm happy with those colors and like we can save some reason. I don't know why. But it wasn't, it wasn't playing ball earlier. The watchman call it the color node in mash. But you can see that the colors are in fact coming through. We get a nice highlights on his spheres. And let's go ahead. And I think in the sky dome. And I'm bringing some tends to up to five. And then I'm gonna do a render. And that's definitely too much. So it's hold escape. And let's go down and bring out to two. And basically what I'm gonna do is play around with that render until I get something that's looking quite nice. And it's probably going to end up being something like 2.5 or something. But then again, this is looking quite nice as well. On kind of happy with this, I may change that yellow color, slightly brighter texture looks a bit dull. And if I zoom in, I'd need to bring also the quality in my render settings. So probably go in here and bringing us maybe to about 12. It'll take twice, at least twice as long. Let's do a little screenshot and let's refresh the render. And you should see some significant time increases, but also some insignificant improvable in terms of the render quality. So I'll just let that render in and I'll pause the video and I'll join you in a second. So this is the Render I've got now. So again, it's not perfect to be honest. I may want to pump a little bit more lifestyle it but less have a let's compare it to how it was before. And you can see that there is considerable increase in quality. But it may be that I just need to kind of increase that quality even more. Maybe I'll add, maybe have a look at the material on, then try changing the material of it. Maybe try changing the color. But that's what we've got. And if we can have, again, have a look at it in here. This is quite a funky kinda little animation that we've gotten is it's looking quite nice. So again, what we've covered in this session is we've looked at using kind of like curves in order to distribute our, our stuff. I'm going to do, I think two more session, two more exercises with you, and then we're going to call a wraps, but yeah, brilliant. Looking forward, seeing you in the next tutorial. 6. Lesson 5 - Dynamics part 2: Hi guys, Welcome to another mash lesson. Now in this one we're going to have a look at this little animation, sort of dominoes kind of animation. It was a really fun one to work on. And you've basically got to mash networks here, two different dynamic mash networks. And honestly this, this is a real fun project to work on. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is we're going to jump straight on it. So let's go and jump into Maya. I've got my setup like this. Again, it's two panels side-by-side. I'm going to go and get a cube. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do a little bit of Marlin wish I say modeling scaling is what I'm gonna do. I'm just going to make a domino. And literally that's as far as I'm doing. Now what I do want to do is I do want to go to the channel box and I want to basically move this was sitting flat on the ground. Okay. So I'm going to go to Attribute Editor or no, sorry, I'm gonna go why? Because it's one unit tall. I'm gonna go to the Y and just move it in all 0.5 units up. I saw that was the rotation. I'm going to go to the Y and you move it nought 0.5 units up. So then if it's one unit tall, it should be sitting exactly on that. Cool. So the setup is going to be pretty simple. And with that selected, go to my Effects menu and go to mash and create a network. So we've got this and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to the attribute editor. And basically I'm going to use the distributed node to distribute them on a great, okay. So let's go distribute, distribute, distribute. Where are we? Grid and okay, so this is what we've got. Now split hard, see gray on gray, I should change back on Calloway. I'm going to put grid acts up to about Haydn, our common, but the numbers are used. Let's go, let's go 30. And grids, easy to say 50 and maybe put that at 25. Okay? And now x distance, I want to kind of put across like that. So that's polite. Say 12, 11, quite close. And let's go z distance. Again. I want them quite close. Z distance, some thin, like 20 I think. So if we come out, I think I want my distance to be maybe a little bit longer. So call it 35. And this, I want to be wider as well, so call it 18. But then there's not enough dominoes for me. So let's go to the grid z and pull out up to say 75. They close enough. I'm going to push that 285 to be honest, or 90 and really, really get a load them in. Cool. And even one's going across an unproven that up to 40. Now it's too much, just go 35. Okay, last dass, das enough for me. So that's kinda like the floor sorted in terms of the actual layout. So yeah, that's kind of working so well, I think we need to do is we're going to put a floor plane in here. Just to kinda give some context. I'm gonna get my mash network. And I'm going to add dynamics. Okay, so add dynamics node. And if I kind of do this first of all, it's basically what's going to happen is they're going to fall foo and fall to the floor. But there, which is pretty cool, pretty cool simulation actually. But yeah, let's kind of go back to the beginning. And what we wanna do in the bullet solver is we want to take this ground too, 0. So what will happen now? Okay, so come in like this. What will happen now is when we play it because they're already on the floor. I'm not gonna go anywhere, just going to stay where they are. Although it looks as if they were kind of eye about, looks as if they're kind of intersect in there. So let's delete this floor plane because they are still intersect in the floor, which is a bit weird because we moved up No.5. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna do that via a transform node. So Transform and Transform node and pull up nought 0.5. There we go. So they are now definitely on that ground plane. That's what it was moving. The actual thing itself doesn't do anything. So now if we play it, basically nothing happens because they're already on the floor. Okay. So that's pretty cool. That's that sorted. And to be honest, that's really all we need to do for this one. So I'm going to rename this mash network, mash for Dominoes. I'm going to go ahead and select my cube and go Mash, Create mash network. And what I'm gonna do now you can see are all connected. The site is, I'm going to go and distribute, I think linearly. So let's hit 0. Okay? And so they are perhaps highly list mesh. They are actually in here. So let's get mash to and we were not distribute them kind of up in the y like this. Okay, We're going to chalk this up to like flowers and we want to also kind of offset them. Yes, something like that. So what I am going to do is I'm going to add a random node just to kind of add some randomness in there. So as go, Why was it random and random node? And this is a lot more I wanted. So kind of like, you know, a thing like this. So 111 must find rotation, rotation vote. So basically what we'll have is a pile of these four falling down. So if I do go ahead and think there's too many actually us go 500. Yeah, this is what I like. So maybe also kind of put them up like that so they got more breathing room and maybe go to mash to an add a transform. And I'm just going to chuck them maybe like 30 into the air. And also on this mash network, I also want to add a dynamics node. So what will happen now if we go back to the beginning is full and they're going to fall onto that floor. Okay. But there will be let's turn these back on. Shift and H, there will be these for them to actually interact with. So you'll notice we can come in, they start all kinda like fall in them. So let's pull this edge, they got more. Now I think the friction is far, far, far too much. So I'm going to make sure that I go to the Bullet Solver and the friction and not change up to like four, something like that. And let's make sure that I'm playing every frame. There we go. And come back to the beginning. And now it'll play every single frame. So shows a lot more accurate when skip anything. And that's kind of looking a lot nicer. And then now you just can start. In fact a think, maybe. Yeah, they're not really interacting there. So we need to kind of have a look at or they are, but they're not falling over. So I think we need to have a look at maybe the friction. Hi, Let's have a look and take that down and see if that makes anything just foreign across the floor really. Although the friction actually that is that has improved, it was the friction there was too much friction there as good to know. So I'm bringing friction down to maybe one. So let's stop and go back to the beginning and bring it down. I'm glad dazzling awards goes just too much friction they would do would stick into the ground too much. So you can kind of basically play around with this as much as you want. Really think it's a little bit too much friction in, two little friction in there now. So basically what you'll wanna do is kinda play around with all of these settings. So I'm gonna go to 1.5. And also I'm going to go into the randomness of mashed who. So randomness. And basically this is almost like a tower of them. So if we come from above, I wanted to be spread a lot more. So let's go say 555. Maybe SCO 3, 3, 3. And let's now see how it's kinda work in. So go back to the beginning and click Play. There we go. It's going kinda like a lot wider. Argue is still quite a little bit of friction in there. So you may kind of want to play around with that with the friction properties. So if I get mash floor dominoes and go to dynamics. And then during the friction of these right friction up to or down like no point thing. And the, and the rolling friction down as give that a go. Because there's friction within the Dynamics and within the bullet solver. So that's important to remember. I reckon that's going to give us a slightly thick male taught, hopefully topple slightly, a bit more easily and now, and maybe they're getting pushed a bit. So let's begin with friction down to nought 0.1. And in the rolling friction to know 0.1. And basically what you wanna do is, is it's all about, it's all about trial and error. I'm playing around with these different things. So it looks if they're fallen a little bit more easily again, but they are kind of getting pushed quite a bit. So I'm going to bring an brings friction all the way down like that. Just see what we get now. And what we wanna do is, I'm relatively happy with what we've got going on. But you'll just want a little bit more stuff there now, a lot more, kind of a lot more top-line us. Cool. That is cool. Yeah. So it's kinda playing with them. And now I like I'm a person. Well, there's a lot of friction there. So let's go into the Bullet Solver and maybe try and increase that. And you want to try and find what's kinda kind of work best. Okay? So I'll let you kind of play around with that because a lot of it is kinda like problem-solving. But this is quite nice. So just have a play around and see what works for you. Arguably, I probably go back into the floor dominoes and just put 0.1 in here and see if that. But this is the last kind of little trial I'll do. I'll do the rendering part next. What you've probably seen before. But yeah, kind of have a play around with that and just kind of see what's working. I think this is working a little bit nicer. We go a little bit more friction in there. But yeah, cool. Awesome. So I'll play around with them. And basically what you'd want to do now as quite a nice still kinda of like shot, but I'm going to get the floor dominoes. Okay, so this is the one which isn't fallen. Right-click assign new material and Arnold AI standard surface. Let's remember what I did mine a thing, I assign them a blue plastic. So plastic and keep it blue, nice and simple. Then repro mashes in the fall in one, we're going to go and right-click, assign new material. And this becomes standard surface plastic. And we're just going to go for a nice red desaturated someone like that. Okay, maybe just go to cool. And so 4.940.8, let's just get to say many oils actually owns be a, hopefully it'll be a recent color. So it's got that wasn't too mild, kept similar color doesn't really matter. Something like that. Done case we've got then I'm gonna go ahead and just like normal ground plane. Let's go and come and we'll color gave, I think was yellow. Let's go to the edge. Click, Shift, double-click control. Really. Pull that up. Object mode. Let's go assign new material. Arnold, standard surface color. Now. I'm going to go color change that to a yellow. And this time we don't have to do what we would do him for. And I mean, what we were doing before was we were having tough to using the color per vertex. We don't need to do it in this instance. So I've kinda, kinda go all that setup. So what I wanna do is go create camera, camera, change this view to my camera view. Line it up. So it kinda looking down on the scene, go into our render settings. Tiff, name, underscore hashtag, wanted to 100. We want to go camera view HD 1080 and render the GPU like normal. Chalk that up to eight. Oh, yeah, truck up to eight for now. And I think that's kind of everything. Let's just turn our resolution gate on so that we can see the view that's actually gonna get rendered. Frame it up a bit more. So something like that, they come into short. Perfect unless render, say maybe this frame buffer here. You can even afford to push in a bit more. So Let's go, Arnold. We need to give it a light. So light and let's go sky dome. And now let's open the Arnold render view. And I saw Mash editors. Let's give this a quick test. Render just to see what we've got. So Arnold RenderView. And when we refresh, there we go. So this is what we've got going on. Yeah, let's hit escape a second. I want to add a de-noise are in there. And yeah, I'll probably end up turn in my life down to like 0.2 or something like that. No, no, 0.8, maybe 0.75. But that's kind of looking quite nice as a render is stuck in. Yeah, really nice there. So flat light, soft light in. Really, really nice like in that. Okay, I mean, obviously these getting stuck out to the side here, maybe you can make them a bit thinner. And again, playing around with those friction properties and it's just a matter of kind of gain loads of different, different, different tests in things done that last phosphorylase radius is testing and playing around with different things. So what you wanna do then is just go to rendering, render, render sequence. And then you'll have something that looks similar to this. And you can see some of them are getting, we are getting pushed out a bit by obviously has more friction on in mine. Cool. So again, learn some new things there. I hope you did pick up a few new things. And in the next session we're going to finish off by doing something like this. So we're going to make this sort of disintegrate. Okay? So I will see you in the next session. Cheers guys. 7. Lesson 6 - Disintegrating Text: Hi guys, welcome back to a, another, another final lesson. I click. We've got this little exploding kind of text tutorial, which we're going to be doing to finish off. So obviously you can see what we're going to be doing. Let's jump on in and get to it. So let's go into Maya. Let's close this down. Let's go into Maya. I'm going to go for Panels, layouts, two panes side-by-side. I'm gonna go to the Text tool. And then I'm going to type, I'm just going to type marsh, give whatever font you want really was no drama with that. I'm going to go across to geometry and I'm going to increase the curve resolution just to get a little bit of a higher resolution specifically on that S. But they're so unlike just up to there again, I could go for go more SCO 15, but yeah, cool. All right then. So what I'm going to do is I also want to make this deformable type to give it all these spaces. And to be honest, is, is not great. What we wanna do is you want to get even faces as much as possible. Now you can play around with the settings here and you can see low and this adds more faces, was bringing it up and move some. But it's not really having an effect on the stage. And, you know, and you can play around with these settings, but it's not, I haven't really managed to get what I'm looking for with this. So what I normally do is I'll get the object. I'll go to modeling and I'm going to go to Mesh. And I'm going to apologize. Now I'll leave this, do its job. And it may take a few minutes. But this is the kind of thing which I'm after. As you can see now, the sort of mesh but their satisfaction survey result. And you can see it's a lot more, the faces of a lot more sort of balanced. So what I'm gonna do after I've done this is I'm just going to select the mesh. And I'm going to go to Edit and then delete all by type history and you want to make sure you do that. Otherwise, you may get some issues kind of come in along. All right, So that's kind of work in how a Leica. So what I wanna do next is I want to actually start doing the watchman call it the match. So I'm going to get a cube. And I know from doing this in past, I want this to be quite small. So I'm gonna go 0.1.1.1. With it selected. I'm gonna go to mash and create mash network. And then what I want to do is basically I want to distribute this across the mesh. So go linear, change that to mesh. You want to middle mouse click and drag it into the input mesh. And what I wanna do is I want to click type mesh shape 1. So that's fine. Scatter or vertex. And yeah, so change it to, I think it's going to be face center and then click flood mesh. And what you'll notice is we've now got, we've now got this cube on every single frame, which is quite cool. However, it's good to kind of, but two thing I might want. So I'm going to add a random node and I'm probably going to change maybe the strength up to five. And you can see this random node kinda makes it all kind of random. And if I increase this, you'll see kinda like it's all sort of dispersed now. Okay? So this is the kind of thing that we're going for. So what we're gonna do is thus, thus the fact that we are going to have them all disperse like this as they break enough. I'm gonna go to mash. And I'm going to go where we go in, we're going to go for the explodes utility. Okay, so click that and click Add explode node. So it's going to ask what meshed you are asked to explode. So we'll need to middle click and drag the type mesh to here. And you can see its use in that kind of thing we've just done with that randomness to, to kind of do this and it's exploding those faces. Okay, So that's kind of what's going on, but they're, so what we wanna do now is we want to kind of have this happening gradually. So in order to do that, first of all, I want to get my repro mash and I want to click Control H just to hide it. So there's no kind of mesh in the middle is just this type mesh here that we're concerned about. Okay? Now, back in mash, if we go back to explode dimers, this fall off object down, right-click and I want you to click Create. So basically what's happening here is if we get this, they'll fall off thing right here and get scale. This is exactly what's happening. So I'm going to scale this all the way up like this and just move it to the side. So then we can kind of bring it in like so and maybe scale it up just a touch more. Okay, cool. So it's going off to the side. So I think I'm have come in at frame 30. So I'm going to get this. I'm going to come to the Translate. I'm going to set key. And by the time we get to frame 75 or move frame. Sme five, I'm going to pull it in and it'll have exploded like that. And so I'm going to right-click and set key. So if we play, Let's just go and play real-time. That was going too fast. We've now got this kind of happening. Okay? So next what we wanna do is we want to go to our mash network and create an offset node. At offset node. And in scale for the x, y, and z wherever that's gone. Yeah, Here what we wanna do is we want to set this to minus one because and basically we want that kind of habits scale basically completely down as this fall off comes across. So minus1, you'll see what happens now, minus one and minus one. So what is going to happen now as this comes across, disappears. Okay? So the only thing that's left to do in this one guys, it's a bit of a quick one. This one. It's been six minutes. I'm done more or less is I'm gonna come back to the beginning. I'll tell you what to do. Wanna do actually is I'd like to bring this up off the floor. So let's go and add a transform node. And let's go and say plus 10. And I didn't think that would do actually. So yeah, let's maybe have a look at possibly reordering it. If we go to mash editor, Let's see if maybe we can reorder this. This happens first, and it doesn't seem to like it. So what we are interested in is kind of when, when you do that, then it kind of disintegrates upwards, which is quite interesting. So if I turn this off now, it doesn't do that. That is really interesting. Cool wanna do is I'm just going to delete that. I don't want to mess around too much. So what I'll do is let's get a ground plane. Scale it up and mirrors, bring it down a bit. I know it's kind of offset for it didn't really matter. If it's below ground is not too much big deal really. Let's bring this across. And let's go edge, Shift, double-click, Control E, extrude it upwards. Okay, what we wanna do is create a camera and make this our camera view. Zoom out. Let's go to the Render Settings. Tiff, name underscore hashtag changes to one to 100. Make sure its camera view HD 1080. And rendering GPU, default this to eight. And that's fine. So let's get a standard AI, standard surface for the background. Let's just make this plastic and white. And white, okay, and now basically it's just this now. So assign new material. Let's go AI standard surface and a comment on what material I had a think it was something like thing like no blushed metal or maybe it was car paint or ceramic acid. It was and it was a red ceramic Cisco from that. So if we can have come across to here, Let's give this a vendor. But first of all, let's make Arnold thing. I'm going to go for the physical sky just to get some nice sharp reflections. And yeah, thing to be honest, the thing I'm okay with that. So maybe intensity, Let's go 1.2 and let's get Arnold render view open and the de-noise of optics. And let's do a render. And let's see what we've got going on. Okay, so that's going to take a little bit of a wild preview in with my example earlier as, as preview name, what you've noticed is I actually went for a bit of a different background. So I got this. This was one material, just a blue kind of like sort of math material. And this I kind of texture mapped a sort of pattern onto the background just to make it a bit different. But you can see it's more or less the same thing. It's just the floor and this thing over here, the same color, so it doesn't really matter. We got some nice shadow is going along the floor. But yes, it can quite nice. So like I said, what you could do is you could go ahead and put a texture on knees, back faces by here. If you wanted to suggest that, maybe. Thank go to automatic UV mapping, UV editor burnout across just some thing like UV shell crossover there and witness on across. Maybe you wanna go assign new material. Let's just go AI standard surface. I'm plugging into the color a file and that file is going to be, let's go back into Marsh and source images and something like that. Click Open. And hopefully if we enable that, we can start to see both of them as well as nine. Okay, so let's right-click Face. Select all these faces, assign existing material. And I think it was AI standard surface one. So now if we just get that shell, UV shell, we can kind of scale it just so it doesn't have that much. I think I was fine Actually. Yeah, let's go for that and let's open Arnold render view and do one more close up to one mole that will render. And we should have something that looks like this. Pretty cool. And again, I might play around with the light in a bit more in that one. Perhaps go for it, Go for the sky domes. We don't get our shadow. But again, it doesn't really matter just to get it looking like mine. All I did is if we go to AI standard surface one, I just made a bit of an off blue when I did it before. So you can kinda just do that. And if we just open up the render view again, just do a, another vendor. And that's very similar to the other one I've got over here. The look is a little bit different. The colors are touched different, but it's near enough. The same thing really. So, yeah, I really do hope you enjoyed that. I hope you've enjoyed the course. I hope you learned a lot. One do is I'm going to do another last video where I'm going to set you a little bit of a, a little bit of a task just to kind of see, I'd love to see what you guys can do. So yeah, cool. I'll see you in the final video. 8. Project Task (Assignment): Okay, then folks, welcome to the final summative video where I'm going to set you a little task. Now I don't know if you've seen the music video by major laser for light, light it up with things called yeah, Lyra. But they've got a load of what they think was coined like dance in avatars. So I'm going to show you something I did in Mash, just a little test. We've got this kind of thing going on, which is pretty cool. Okay, so we've got this sort of dance. I can't just go in for it. And then I've, basically, I've used the distribute mesh and I use the voxel method for this and that's all I'm going to give you. But it's, it's a really nice kinda little animation. So I'm going to set you a task to just do something really creative with this. Now, another little tip is where I got this. I didn't animate this myself. If you go to Mixamo.com is owned by Adobe. If you've got an Adobe account, what you can do is you can go to mix them. O.com, come into here, you can click like dance. And then you can say wireless, get this lumber dance in. And you can adjust the kinda of like enthusiasm and make it more enthusiastic. Space. The arms go bit wilder. And basically then you can, what you can do is download and you'll want to download an FBX file. And let's say 24 frames per second with skin and download. And what I'll do is I'll give you a FBX file, like I said. And you can just then go into Maya. And when you into Maya, you can just go File Import and then you'd need to locate that FBX file. And basically you've got your mesh then even that you can use to distribute stuff on. So I'd love for you guys to do, love for you to kind of get one of these and then do your render and then post it up just so I can kind of see what you've kind of done because I'm really intrigued. I'd love to kinda like get like loads of people together and kind of like clip after clip, like in the major laser, light it up music video. That will be so cool. So now that I've downloaded that and rumba dance into FBX, what I can do is go to file. What you, what you really should do is you should locate that. So I'll copy this. This is the one I used earlier to copy this and go into your project setup and put it into scenes. Okay, so I'll put it mash record and into scenes. I would save any of them, say. And then what I can do is make sure that I have set my project. And let's set to mash recording. And then I can go to File Import. And there we go. I've got lumber dance in FBX and import that and come out. Now. This is what I've got. I've got what looks like 55 frames. And it would then repeat. Okay, So that's why I want you to kinda do have a little look. What you may wanna do is you may want to get a little bit of inspiration from if we go to major laser and it lights it up so you can I don't really play it on this, but if you watch this video, There's loads are kinda stuff in naturally really cool. So thank you again for taking this course. I'm really intrigued to see what you can do and see if you can get something looking like this. Cheers guys. See you soon.