One of the things that instantly got my attention when I was learning Maya, was the fact that you could combine any number of tools together. Very few things in Maya are an island onto themselves. A MASH network in Maya expands Maya’s procedural capabilities to a some extent. (This is even more true in a completely procedural application such as Houdini).
You can think of it as a box of Lego bricks. You can piece together a bunch of bricks to come up with the result that you want. Want a particle emitter to elite cloth instead of particles? Not a problem. Need to rivet something to something else? Use a follicle. Inline with that thinking, you can combine and attach a MASH network, the heart of Maya’s motion graphics toolkit, to an nCloth element.
Putting together a VR experience, Autodesk’s Daryle Obert offers a look into combining a number of tools in Maya to generate a motion graphics style animation. Daryl shows how you can work with Maya’s MASH networks and nCloth, using MASH’s Audio Node combined with a bit of shader logic to generate a strobing effect.
Along the way, there are quite a few tips on how to hook up a MASH network to create geometry based outlines on a moving and deforming nCloth animation. Pretty cool!
