Growing Vines and Drawing Lines in Maya

In this four part video we'll cover the steps in creating a custom rig for a pose-able, shape-able growing vine or 3d stroke effect in Maya. We'll start by looking at how to use polyCube construction history in rigging and how the polySplitRing node can offer even more control in our setup later on. Also covered are using rendering nodes such as clamps, multiplyDivides, and conditions to further control our setup behind the scenes. The wire deformer will be the driving force behind posing the rig and we'll wrap up by creating controls with custom attributes and clean it all up into a logical hierarchy with sensible naming conventions.

Part 1: Setup

Part 2: Connections

Part 3: Controls

Part 4: Wrapping Up

Food for thought: How about making the wire curve a dynamic hair system for even more control.

As always if you've enjoyed, found this helpful, or even have any questions please feel free to post in the comments below and vote it up at whatever tutorial aggregator you may have found it.

Comments

[Jamie]

Great tute mate. I can't believe I've never used the wire deformation tool before. Can see a great deal of potential use for that.

And to add icing on the cake I can import the geometry into Unity 3D (gaming engine) and it grows the same as in Maya :D

[JAB]

Liam asks:

"Thanks for this, very nice technique.
Any ideas for adding branches/flowers out from points along the geometry?
I'm assuming that would involve a more complex rig...
Liam"

It actually would not involve a more complex rig, just multiple sets of the same rig. What I've actually done is use the wire curve in the rig as a motion path for adding branches. If you attach something to a curve as a motion path and kill the animation off the uValue attribute, you basically get a way to constrain an object along the length of a curve.

I actually go over using this technique in a slightly different manner in step 4 of my written tutorial on dynamic cameras via maya hair

Cheers

[KradisZ]

Your tutorial is wonderful, everything was explained in detail and no boring extra blah blah, and very informative, I have to say your method of creating the vine tutorial was very exquisite and creative, as well effective. Thank you very much for sharing this. I will not forget you're the one who made it.

[Greg]

Thanks for the great tutorial. How would you duplicate the rig?

[JAB]

Thanks for the kind words. To duplicate the rig (or any rig really) you would just need to select the top node in the hierarchy and from the edit menu choose duplicate special options, check on Duplicate input graph and Assign unique name to child nodes

Cheers