How To Use Maps to Drive a MASH ID Node

Seen some of Ash Thorp’s work? Intricate patters that swap shapes to form a larger image. You might have wondered how some of that was put together. Although some of the work, like in Assassin’s Creed used Side FX Houdini, the fundamentals will be similar in other applications. If you are using Maya, you can use a MASH ID Node to get a pretty good result.

How to use MASH’s ID node along with texture maps to drive your animations[/pullqoute]

Maya’s motion graphics toolkit includes an ID node. It is meant to customize the way that instanced objects are assigned to MASH points. the interesting part is that you can use falloffs and image maps to drive the node.

Watch as Ian Waters takes a dive into creating those intricate patterns that will display a different element to form an image. The process is rather simple with MASH. Ian creates a set of 2D elements with geometry and controls which piece will display by using a MASH ID node. There are a couple of examples here, ending in a result that very much looks like it could be ASCII art. Neat!