SOuP plugins for maya tutorial

The *great* David Schoneveld made this  video tutorial during his process to learn Peter Shipkov’s plug-in SOuP.

David notes, “Basically Peter shows me an example of how a node works and I go home play/test/learn and make sure I get it, then demo that small section of it. Since only Peter knows how to use his plug-in completely, and with the current Documentation state, we’ll make video tutorials to help keep everyone up to speed who also wants to learn it. There are some really cool features, but we must start from the ground up to build a foundation of which to build better and more complex examples later. ” David also provides some example files here.

SOuP group node from destruct007 on Vimeo.

If you are unfamiliar with SOuP plugins for Autodesk Maya, Peter Shipkov explains…

“SOuP is a set of plug-ins that extend the procedural (and other) capabilities of Maya. As you probably know Maya needs more (sophisticated) “live” data generators and modifiers that operate on components lists, objects groups and point attributes. This imposes a lot of limitations when doing more involving things like complex effects, advanced characters and actually quite often geometry manipulations.

Still not sure what i am talking about ? Here is a basic example: Let’s say you selected few poly faces and extruded them, but then you decided that you want to add few more faces to your extrusion – you can delete the polyExtrude node you just created and create new one for all the faces you want, or you can extrude the faces you missed the first time by adding another polyExtrude node. Not very convenient. Same applies to pretty much every geometry manipulation these days.

In the ideal world you should be able to just select these few faces and add them to your poly extrusion. This kind of stuff is usually not a big problem when doing regular modeling or other relativelly simple tasks (from technical complexity stand point), but in other cases it actually is a big problem and we often have to put significant amount of (redundant) work by hand to componsate for it. “

You really MUST see the examples on Peter Shipkov’s page.