Maya’s Instancer is a versatile tool that can be used in animation, modeling or even rigging. It does get a bit tedious to set up in some cases, with some scripting and expression to help the task at hand.
Add Maya’s instancing abilities along with a curve — and then you really have something. Thankfully, game developer Mariano Merchante has created a plugin that will allow you to easily instance objects along a curve. This greatly simplifies the process for using the instancer with curves in the viewport.
Using the curve you can easily place objects accurately in the scene, or even anime the objects along the curve, or even animate the curve itself.
The Instance Along Curve Plugin will let you easily instance an object by count or by distance between instances. It also gives you various rotation modes, which can come in handy when you are creating chains and chain-links.
Instance Along Curve Features:
- A dependency graph node, so it works gracefully with the Maya environment.
- Instance an object by count or by distance between instances.
- Various rotation modes, including chain mode.
- Customize the instances transformation by ramps evaluated in curve parameter space.
- Customize the ramps’ offset with keys or expressions for animations.
- Customize how instances look in viewport.
- Randomize instances transformations.
- Portable.
- User friendly, and highly flexible tool.
The Instance Along Curve Plugin for Maya offers a user friendly and highly flexible tool for replicating objects for rigging, animation, or modeling. There are controls to randomize instances, or customize the transformations of the objects using ramps.
When you use the Instance Along Curve plugin, it essentially creates a new dependency graph node called instanceAlongCurveLocator. This handles all the necessary logic for the plugin. Instance Along Curve also includes a node creation command and an Attribute Editor template for a very familiar and user friendly interface.
The Plugin is available for download at Mariano Merchante’s GitHub repository. Check out the Maya Instance Along Curve Plugin here.
