Miscellaneous

I finished another plug-in for Maya back in November that will displace a polygon's vertices in real time.  The plug-in moves the vertices in their normal direction based off a grey-scale 2D texture.

The node is based off  a  deformer which will allow a change in the set membership. During each frame, the active vertices in the set membership will have their UV coordinates queried based off a given UV Map. Then, using the color input of the displace Mesh Node, a color is retrieved that will be used to displace the vertices in their normal direction.

Currently the node only works with 2D textures, which does include image sequences. In the example video all the polygon meshes has a high density for a more accurate representation of the 2D texture. the example in the bottom right corner is 150 by 150 vertices.

Few of the presets were referencing a texture map causing an error when trying to use them. They have been fix and a new version is available. Also, I renamed the folders to "mia_material" and "mia_material_x".

Keep the comments coming.

Read the current discussion here!

Removed the extra white spaces from the file names for the MIA presets for Maya and added a new download for Advance Output.  A round of applause to Dagon for the great suggestions and ummm... corrections.

Keep the comments coming. 

Read the current discussion here!

Working with the help of David Hackett, I converted all the MIA Presets for 3D MAX that was created by Jeff Patton to individual presets for Maya using Python. The presets that required procedural or texture files were changed to the value of black.

If you have any questions about the presets and Mental Ray I will gladly forward your inquiries to David. After all... I am a Technical Artist, not a Render Monkey!

Update (December 6, 2008): Create a folder called "attrPresets" in your presets folder and drop the folder from the zip inside. Wasn't very clear on how to get them to work.

Download MIA Presets Here: mia_presets.zip

Download Advance Output MIA Presets Here: mia_ao_presets.zip