Maximilian Schönherr Walks Through Creating an Animation Using MASH Flight & Trails With Force Fields

3D Artist Maximilian Schönherr has a look at creating a flocking animation using Maya’s motion graphics toolkit. MASH has a flight node that can handle a few of the various flocking systems that you might require. A recent addition to Maya was the ability for MASH to make use of Bullet Physics. Why not combine the two, a Flight node and Force Feilds typically used for simulations?

Schönherr shows how you can tame the MASH flight node using a couple of dynamic fields that compete with each other. “We use a radial force field (from Maya particles basically) and feed it into the MASH Flight node,” Schönherr says. “It will immediately stall the flocking motion of the cubes in our scene – until we loosen the grip of the radial field a little and give the cubes more freedom to fly.”

The scene gets some nice trails thanks to MASH’s Trails node, adding a profile NURBS curve to create long tails on the moving objects.