Use Paint FX for Assets as Arnold Stand-ins & MASH to Populate a Terrain with Vegetation in Maya

Technical Specialist for Autodesk South Europe, John Paul Giancarlo walks through how to create some plant and vegetation assets using Maya’s Paint FX as a base for scene population using MASH. The workflow also involves using Arnold Stand-ins so the scene becomes much more manageable, yet still rendered with the full resolution assets at render time.

Paint FX might almost feel like an old and dusty area in Maya. PaintFX hasn’t been touched in such a long time in terms of new features and additions. That doesn’t make it any less useful in the right circumstance. The ability to easily and parametrically create and adjust plants and other elements is still viable in a workflow. Paint FX can be converted into polygon objects with some control over the level of details. Assets like these are used by Giancarlo and prepped as stand-ins for Arnold. Giancarlo uses MASH for distribution and random placement of the vegetation elements, foregoing MASH’s world node.