Aikiman yup with another SOuP for Maya plugin demonstration, where he extracts alpha data from an animated ocean texture, and brings those weights into the peak deformer to displace the mesh.
SOuP – Weight maps > peakDeformer > fluid emission from Aikiman yup on Vimeo.
Using textureToArray and arrayToMulti nodes we can extract alpha data from a texture, in this case an animated ocean texture, and pipe the weights into the peak deformer to displace our mesh. Once thats in place, we can then create an attributeTransfer node with bounding object and create another weight map to localize fluid emission where we want it. For added realism I mentioned in a previous vid to use the mesh displacement as a velocity emitter into the fluid. So as the mesh points move upward it will push the fluid in that direction as well as when the points drop down, it will suck the spray down too.
“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.
