Mash - inherit aim (or rotation) from particles

[Anonymous]

Is it  possible to inherit rotations from nParticles to MASH ?

Connection to position is not a problem - but how about rotation or aim direction?

I have nicely layed out particles, with aim direction, but I would love to use it in MASH nodes insted of tedious mel scripting.

Another solution to my problem would be getting getting orientation from tangent U of emitting mesh somewhere within MASH.

[t_chanma]

Hi there,

You can indeed accomplish this by connecting the nParticle shape node's Instance Data to the MASH node's Input Points (note that this will overwrite the Distribute node's effect).

Hope that helps.

[faline.custodio.da.silva]

@Anonymous

I've made a bunch of cubes that have been distributed onto a sphere's vertices (via MASH > Distribute node), and have set them move up and down along their Local position Y-Axis (in the Audio node) in response to a music file...

I figure setting Transformation Space to local in the Audio node would do the trick. Technically it does work with the rotation and scale, but not positional values .. position still behaves in a World-space manner. So setting a higher y-position value makes all the cubes globally move in Y, rather than each of them moving along their assigned vertex normals, which I assume would be Y-local position.

[Anonymous]

To be honest I failed and dropped mash and went back to good old instancer way:) I couldn't find a suitable solution to my problem using mash networks.

[Anonymous]

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> by connecting the nParticle shape node's Instance Data to the MASH node's Input Points

---

Hi,

I tried the method you mentioned in 2018.3 and I am only getting position information. Some random particle rotation is not coming through. Does this method still work in 2018.3 or is there another way to accomplish this? I am also interested in seeing how I can drive MASH attributes with other custom nParticlePP (per particle) attributes.

I am pretty familiar with scripting nParticles to do almost anything. I would like to utilize all this in connection with MASH.

Is there documentation for such a thing? The current documentation is not very useful.  Pretty much any question that comes to mind is not included and means searching on Google for anything. This is not very productive.

Any supplement info would be more than useful.

[mspeer]

Hi!

Here it works.

Please don't forget to set in Particle Shape node Instancer -> Rotation to "rotation PP" (and of course enable "Compute Rotation")

For further help please upload a scene-file.

(Please don't create duplicate messages that's against the forum rules, see 4.)

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-dynamics/forum-rules/td-p/4543679

[Anonymous]

---

@mspeer wrote:

Please don't forget to set in Particle Shape node Instancer -> Rotation to "rotation PP" (and of course enable "Compute Rotation")

---

This does not work with expression driven rotationPP or "Compute Rotation" turned on.

A regular nParticle Instancer produces rotating instances. MASH does not replicate the nParticle Instancer rotation.

If this setup is working for you please provide a working scene.

[mspeer]

Hi!

Overlayed:

- Particle Instancer (blue)

- MASH (green):

[Anonymous]

OK.

I got  the rotation to finally work. Even though I would not like to have to this every time.

The Mash connection and the instancer connection have to be made to the same

    instanceData[X].instancePointData

otherwise it doesn't work.

Also once you connect

    nParticleShape1.instanceData[0].instancePointData

to

    MASH.inputPoint

the instancer portion  of the nParticle Shape become grey. So no more changes can be made unless the connection      

    nParticleShape1.instanceData[0].instancePointData

to

    MASH.inputPoint

is first broken.

So there is a "solution" for rotationPP but it so non direct that it make me wonder if MASH is the good alternative that it is pretending to be. It would be good to further develop nParticles to make them more ergonomic than to throw  MASH into the mix and pretend that it works. This solution is not a good solution. It does not make MAYA better. I am assuming that that's the objective.

Now how can you drive

    MASH scale

with the

    radiusPP

or a

    custom vector scalePP?

Or does that require more of the same bizarre under the hood re-wiring?

I am trying to stay away from this kind of workflow because I have had enough of it over time. For simple things it should not be necessary to this kind of stuff unless we are trying to make the workflow as annoying and tedious as possible for every old and new customer withe every possible everyday task.

It's all about productivity.

I would hope for some input from a MASH developer on this.

    Ian Waters?

or a Maya developer.

These kind of user devised workarounds are what have gotten us where we are. In a bad place in my opinion. Where every task takes for ever. Not only does it take to much time to implement (or write another script to automate it), but it take much too long to hunt down these solutions. Using Maya is not a hobby for most people. They have to get things done on a timely fashion.

[Anonymous]

Hello...

I was trying this solution from a particle system created with the MASHbakeToParticles.mel script coming from a MASH network with a World node generating points via the Terrestrial Ecosystem algorithm.  From what I see in the .mel script, I'm deducing only the position is passed through to the particleShape.  

It's been years I don't mess with MEL and before doing so, I would like to know if there is any update regarding passing complete info from MASH to particles, including instances ID, rotation, scale, visibility, etc...  Any news or help for this one?

Cheers