Peter Shipkov’s plug-in SOuP which extends the procedural capabilities of Autodesk Maya (seriously, this guy must be brilliant!) has recently updated to include new point cloud scatter features and also voronoi shatter algorithms. The premise of the plug in is a little broad for a simple explanation, perhaps it is best set with an example… If you have a sphere and you extrude 2 faces from that sphere, with soup (adding procedural abilities to this) you can go back and edit the original sphere shape node and add more resolution without effecting the extrude you have done. Alternatively, if you require to add a few more faces to that extrude, you can do so without redoing the extrusion for those faces – you can just ad the new faces to be included in the extrude group.
This becomes absolutely exciting when you are doing a shatter or a crack! Imagine building a shatter with dynamics, and then changing the underlying shape object underneath without destroying anything yu have previously created… or editing the shatter procedurally the same way – So cool.
Accompanying the download are sample scenes again, and if you haven’t checked out the page for SOuP, Peter provides some demos and descriptions that are not to b missed.
