Certainly more and more things these days are better done on GPU, one of those things is plain old point computations, and it is with that in mind where Michal Gamrat has developed a small framework for Autodesk Maya to take advantage of NVIDIA CUDA cores to process points in directly in Maya.
mgNodes is a plugin for Autodesk Maya that can be used for processing points based on nVidia CUDA technology
mgNodes is a framework for processing points in Maya using taking advantage of CUDA to accelerate certain computations. mgNodes has 16 nodes that can scatter, display, buffer, transform, and much more, all using the nVidia GPU processing power. There are also two Deformer nodes in the mgNoiseLocator and mgNoise Nodes.
Michal walks through the use of all the nodes available in mgNodes and shows some of the possibilities working with setting rotations, scale, object index and connecting mgNodes with Maya’s nParticle System. mgNodes’ list of nodes include:
- mgScatterPoints
- mgDisplayPoints
- mgPointsRotation
- mgColorBuffer
- mgPointsUV
- mgPointsScale
- mgPointsObjectId
- mgDisplayContainer
- mgPointsContainer
- mgPointsMerge
- mgPointsEmitter
- mgPointsAttrShuffle
- mgPlantPoints
- mgPointsSelection
- mgPointsCache
- mgPointsTransform
To learn more about the mgNodes Autodesk Maya Plug-in, Michal has a small page with documentation for all the nodes, and a free download.
