Procedural objects in Maya

From http://www.osito.tv/index.php/portfolio/audi-imagination-meets-engineering-by-blind/

There was going to be some object cloning, abstract shapes, and wire-like structures. The heart of Houdini is procedural executions, something that Maya can also achieve with a little help of scripting. I could have scripted a line that duplicated every object based on the position and rotation the objects would acquire at a given frame. This would have left me with a non-dynamic object that wasn’t going to leave any chance at being animated or affected other than by hand.

As I was working closely with Lawrence, I had a clear idea of what he wanted- trails of objects that would vary, rotate, scale, animate, drift after creation, had the ability to be affected by fields, and were, of course, interchangeable, keeping Houdini’s procedural approach. So I created this rig based on an particle instancer. The particles were given a property per frame by a driven object, given the object’s vectoral information (X,Y,Z) from its scale and rotation attributes, and transferred to two ghost locators (one for scale and one for rotation) for the input to be “resetted.” Then, each input was connected and replaced with a variable and input into a custom Per Particles (Array) Attribute, linked to a creation expression, and ‘Voila!’, you have a driven object that leaves trails of whatever object you connect with copied attributes from rotation and scale. Position and quantity would come from the trail of particles liberated from the emitter linked to the “driving object” (of course). I called it the lawrence_object_rig and distributed to all the other 3d artists (Ben Lopez and Jason Kim) on the spot.