Some super nerdy stuff from Marco D’ambros, who provides some tips for working with Maya’s Matrix Nodes. Marco creates an example where he sets up a cube’s transform to follow along the surface of another object with locators as controls and uses this set up to demonstrate how understanding Matrix Nodes in Maya can be pretty valuable.

Over the course of this example, Marco points out that one issue will be that, with this set up, the object doesn’t slide around with orientation at all, and as a solution Marco uses a fourByFourMatrix Node in Maya using a vectorProduct Node to create a cross product vector from the closestPointOnMesh Normal Output to create the matrix needed to provide orientation. Some really great stuff here, and this is well worth the seventeen or so minute watch!