Today I received a copy of the book that’s depicted on the left. The author, Mark Jennings Smith, has done a marvellous job by compiling the most exciting plug-ins available for Autodesk Maya in one place. ticket01 got a whole chapter [p.247 - p.283] where Seamour, Wire and SmartDuplicate are being described in full detail. Thanks Mark and all the best for the book from us!
The latest addition the the Particle Tools includes an option to pipe the output of the ParticleMuxer into a new particle shape giving artists the possibility to create astonishing effects with lots of particles that can be rendered by the GPU. The video below uses an emitter creating point particles that are influenced by a gravity field and an image based displacement node coming with the Particle Tools.
The second support node for the free Particle Tools inside the t01.mufpi project is now officially out. The so called “imageBasedDisplacement” does what you probably already assume by its name, it offsets particles based on texture information. The video below is a quick test of an emitter spitting out particles that are influenced by an animated, rotating checker texture.
I know that some of you folks are really anxious to play with the new particle nodes and I hope to release them very soon. For the time being I just wanted to release a little video that came into being while testing the interaction between emitted particles and the rayIntersect node.
In conjunction with some other stuff I was planning to do regarding particles and the instancer in Maya there was an interesting thread coming up on percutio.com [german] which discussed the possibility to create some sort of pinscreen object in Maya. Although that didn’t seem to be too hard of a problem at first it was a really tedious process to come up with a solution that doesn’t involve a lot of manual setup. Scripting had certainly to be done but this alone proved to be too slow and most of all the animation problem and maybe a real-time feedback during setup where lacking. So I took some hours to create the first ones of some nodes that deliver an easy possibility of manipulating the particle data stream going to the instancer. The first results are shown in the little video below.
Today I came across this thread on CGTalk. Basically the problem was how to create an equidistant inset on a face. Since I’m not that much of a modeler I never was in the position to ask that question. But after I read the post it was clear that there’s already a solution that can deal with non-convex polygons of (nearly) any shape. And I only add “nearly” since I haven’t stumbled upon that crazy polygon that will screw my day 
As the topic already mentions, the solution to that problem is a little check box, and some code I added, in LiveWire. It’s now edge loop ready The picture below shows the new face that is being inserted when using the “Keep Faces” option in LiveWire.
Well, yesterday I showed you a litte video about the upcoming Live Wire node. All I can say is that the performance of that node has been optimized by factor 20 
and that it will be released by tomorrow. For starters there’re some images that were created with this new tool.
The video below should give you an impression of a new feature that will be included in the freely available t01.mufpi project. This is an very early stage an should be considered experimental but it won’t take long until I’m going to release it to the public.
What does it and why did I create it?
What: This node creates a (geometric) wireframe representation of an input mesh. This representation is a mesh itself. The inset, meaning how “thick” the wires are, can of course be altered.
Why: One reason were the many topics with this or a similar question: “How to create a wire object from a mesh?” I found in various CG forums. Another reason is my cooperation with lots of people that work in architecture. They often start creating a building using a mesh as hull object and need a wire representation of a mesh.
Today the Generizer got support for trim regions on the base model. As an example I took the company logo. [click on image to zoom in]
In the upcoming version of SmartDuplicate the Generizer node will feature the first implementation of a 3-way blend mode. This texture driven method to create a blending between 4 different shapes brings the power of transformational design at your fingertips and is shown exemplary in the picture below. [click on image to zoom in]
All geometry types supported by the Generizer will be blendable. The reformations have constraints on their connectivity, meaning that the topology of the templates should match to get proper results.
