From the course: Maya: Motion Graphics Workflow with MASH

What is MASH? What is proceduralism? - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Motion Graphics Workflow with MASH

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What is MASH? What is proceduralism?

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- [Voiceover] So if you're unfamiliar with what the term proceduralism means, it basically describes the art of building systems to control things rather than doing everything by hand. So instead of manually animating every keyframe for every parameter change we want to make, we can build systems that can change a multitude of parameters for us. There are a couple advantages of this. On one hand, we can build things that have a large number of objects with lots of subtle, different changes that would be a real pain to actually have to do by hand. And on the flip side, we can build systems that are adaptable and reusable so we can put together networks that we can use to do a variety of different things. And so we can use our work more than once, which can be really useful and really a timesaver. And a third bonus thing that's great about it is it's a really fun way to play with things, because it allows you to experiment and try things out in a playful, nonlinear way rather than always having to build a system or build a setup from the ground up every time. So just as a really simple explanation of a procedural system in MASH, I have this little grid of randomized colored and scaled cubes here. And without going into the details of how this is set up because we'll be doing things like that over the course of the course, I'm just gonna grab this little locator object here, and I'm just gonna move through. And you can see as I move this object through these cubes, all those scales change randomly as I move that through. And I'm doing that with the one simple motion. We can set one keyframe on one side and one keyframe on the other side, and all of that motion would basically happen for free because of a very simple network that we've set up. And we've set up that network with MASH procedural tools. MASH is a plugin set for Maya that is now part of the Maya product that allows us to build motion graphics and visual effects procedural systems all within Maya without having to do that in external applications. It's fun and easy to use. If we go to its main node here, you can see that we have a bunch of gray icons that show us all of our different nodes that we have available to us to do things. And so now we're gonna dive in, and we're gonna start looking at what these different nodes do. And then, as the course goes on, build more and more complex networks.

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