MASH, the procedural animation toolkit for Autodesk Maya has recently dropped with a new version that gave birth to instances of some great new features. Earlier, we had a look at the new Maya to After Effects bridge included with Mash 3.1, as well as two new deformers which can prove helpful in even replacing some of Maya’s native.’
Dash in MASH 3.1
There is a feature of note that wasn’t covers and that was Dash, what Ian Waters calls “a throw-away scripting language.” in Maya and found within MASH 3.1. Sounds great, but what exactly is a throw away scripting language?
The only way to really see its usefulness is to see it in action. Dash offers a quick access command line that can be available right overtop of selected channel box items in Maya. You can then tell those channels to do something using Dash’s simple syntax.
Dash can be very useful for perfuming quick layout tasks such as distributing objects, or quickly offsetting animations. You are also able to control graph editor attributes on animation by adding ease, simply by typing the command followed by a weight.
Pretty impressive stuff so far. Ian notes that Dash is still inits early stages, but it already looks like a promising and valuable tool, not only for MASH tasks, but for a lot of general and basic Maya tasks as well, as Dash does not depend on any MASH 3.1 networks (although MASH needs to be loaded for that session).
Availability
MASH 3.1 is available for £89.99 (~$150.00) (inc. VAT). Check out MASH for Maya here for more information. For those that just want to see what all the fuss is about there’s also the free trial version.
