Since its release back in October 2012, the MASH procedural animation tool kit for Maya has been in continual development with version 1.2 now in the fourth round of beta testing.
In line with this, MASH 2.0 will see release soon as a commercial product and is completely rewritten in C++ making MASH 2.0 up to 100x faster, and has an integrated instancer -No longer are you required to cache the networks to render. An integrated instancer also means that there is no need to install the SoUP plugins for Maya in order for some parts of MASH to work.
MASH 2 also features two new nodes, with a Maths node for creating simple equations can be used to animate or manipulate objects and a new Initial State node which actually replaces the button on the Waiter and now also includes scale and rotation information.
MASH 2.0 will be offered at £89.99, or roughly $115.00, and there is a free to try demo version available.
MASH is a suite of Maya nodes developed in-house at Mainframe aimed at enabling our artists to create versatile ‘motion design’ style animations
Previously, Version 1.1 added some new Nodes the to motion graphics suite or Autodesk Maya with the Offset Node for offsetting values, the Echo Node, simplifying echoing from previous versions, and the ID Node for assigning instancer objects to MASH points.
More recently, MASH 1.2 added a variance slider for randomly offsetting objects along a curve in time, and as MASH edges closer to a new release, Ian Waters posts a few videos showing some of the changes and uses for MASH procedural animation tool kit for Maya, and provides an overview for using MASH in Maya, covering most of the nodes and some possibilities in stringing MASH Nodes together.
There are still some issues with MASH 1.2 with the Points Node generating an error in Maya 2012, and MASH not working with Maya’s Viewport 2.0, and some batch rendering issues that are being worked out, however, you are able to download the MASH 1.2 Beta4 on MASH’s home here.
MASH is Mainframe’s Manchester studio’s in-house suite of Nodes for Maya developed for their Motion Design projects and since has been released and shared as downloadable package care of Mainframe North and Ian Waters.
