Now that MASH is an Autodesk product and comes integrated with Maya 2016 Extension 2, a steady stream of tutorials, examples and tests have been making their rounds. Here, Ian Waters shows how you can create an interesting animated outline effect where some strokes will follow the edge of 3D type. MASH is a procedural animation plugin, which is now seen as Maya’s motion graphics toolkit.
Using MASH’s Trails node with Type to create an interesting stroke effect.
This uses MASH’s trail node, which can generate a 3D polygon stroke based off of an object’s motion, or simply, curves. In this case, the trails are using the outlines that were used to create the 3D type in the scene, and uses them to create the animated outlines.
There are a few tips that you need to be aware of when trying to create an animated outline effect, which Ian walks us through. Although it seems rather simple, creating an animated outline like this in previous versions of Maya would have been a lot more tedious, making use of Maya’s animation paths for each letter.
