John Paul Giancarlo Shows How to Set up Basic Crowds Using MASH.

Maya’s motion graphics toolkit MASH has plenty of other uses in anything that requires animation. Few things are as versatile as a set of procedural animation nodes. Here, Autodesk Technical Specialist John Paul Giancarlo shares a used for MASH that allows you to create basic crowds. Crowd simulations have the reputation as complex systems that require special tools, scripting, and other higher-level elements. That doesn’t need to be the case, especially when MASH has some tools that can create the most basic of crowds.

Many years ago, when MASH was comparatively still in its infancy, Ian Waters Showed how you could use multiple instances to set up a crowd simulation in Maya. Sometime later, Sr. Technical Specialist for Autodesk specializing in 3d workflows in entertainment Lee Fraser also showed a simple crowds set up that also involved MASH.