Maya’s Motion Graphics Toolkit, MASH can be a great way to create bio and medial animation. MASH offers simplicity in replicating objects, but it is also great at procedural animation. Medical Illustrator and Animator, Emily McDougall walks us through animating a biological system. Using MASH, it is easy to set up a scene with red blood cells and animate them all at once.
In previous versions of Maya, a scene like this would have used nParticles. Although completely capable, nParticles need much more setup to get going, and to control. MASH makes creating blood cell animation much more simple.
Emily covers the basics for setting up the scene with lights and a background. Using a simple cube will take care of create one red blood cell. MASH will then take care of replicating it to maya red blood cells. Maya’s motion graphics toolkit can also make short work of the animation. You can animate the cells using path animation and random nodes to break up the movement.
Emily has another tutorial using both Maya and MASH. That tutorial covered how to create animated Villi, with another simple setup.
