RenderBurger shows how to place icing or snow on objects in Maya using nParticles in 2 minutes.
While simulations are super-fun to play around with, they are also quite helpful in lots of workflows. Take, for instance, modeling. One example of this is creating snow deposits on certain parts of a surface. Check out this new tutorial from RenderBurger’s (Farid Ghanbari) that shows how to place the icing on a donut using Maya’s nParticles.
nParticles to Place Icing on a Donut.
nParticles are part of Maya’s unified dynamics and simulations system, Nucleus. While they’ve become less popular since Bifrost, they are still quite handy for producing things like this. The tutorial covers working with nParticles and emitting them from the surface of the donut.
Some slight adjustments to the particle settings and converting them to geometry is a simple way to get a model without actually doing any modeling. The technique is a good one to use for snow, icing or any other elements that you want to deposit in specific areas.
Bifrost Meshing Also Works.
With the advent of Maya’s Bifrost Graph, you may want to create the same thing, using nodes. Bifrost has meshing and re-meshing capabilities that can become more flexible than nParticles. Using Bifrost for particle meshing also makes it much easier to get back to your original particles, without stacking a lot of history on your simulations.
How to Mesh Particles With Maya Bifrost.
The Maya Guy Phil Radford had a couple of posts on meshing Bifrost particles. “The beauty of doing it here rather than with nDynamics is that you can make quick, simple changes on the fly,” Radford mentions. Bifrost offers a few nodes for working with mesh conversions, some of them used in this tutorial.
In another example, Daryl Obert showed the basics of high-quality meshing from Bifrost. Check out this tutorial from (back then) Autodesk expert Daryl Obert who shows his workflow to mesh a Bifrost simulation of a thick substance as if it were ice cream.
One Step Further.
Of you can mesh elements and objects, why not construct geometry from scratch with Bifrost nodes? Check out this tutorial from Lead Tech Animator Loic Pinsard, who shows how to make meshes using the Construct Mesh node.
