im trying to make a “Hovering” like animation. all i need to do is be able to plug a sin wave into the translate values of the null and have a control that can manipulate the amplitude or something to that effect, but I have no idea what nodes to use to be able to get this right.
can anyone point me in the right direction?
lots of ways to do that.
keyframes and use the infinity option
a sin expression (with some multiplier for the amplitude and the frequency )
could also plug a noise texture.
or even use Mash with the breakout node and the signal node ( this option is probably the best if you don’t want to mess with expressions and the signal node has lots of parameters )
thanks for the reply
Keyframes would probably be the easiest option, but not very dynamically adjustable
expression would work too, but getting that to work right where its easy to setup is a bit of a pain.
Noise texture… now this is one that i also thought of, coming from a 3Ds Max background, this is what i would normally use. I’m just unsure how I would wire this up in maya. Will look more into this.
Used mash before and to be honest, not very happy with the performance results I was getting out of it
what type of performance issue you had?
It’s pretty robust actually, and for your case you will have a dedicated noise node with mash.
I was using mash to make random duplicates of 5 different fruit objects to drop into a cup
I needed it to have around 100+ objects and Mash was just not cutting it…(it was extremely slow) I ended up using standard Nparticles with a geometry instancer eventually.
If I were to go about using a Noise Texture node what would i plug into it to use the timeline to evaluate time as a constant? (I.E. i need help plugging what into what to get this working.)
actually, thinking about it, a noise might be too random for what i need…
I need to basically drive a controllers Y-value in a constant fashion (so lets say between 10 and-10) so that its a constant loop, but then have a controll that can change the amplitude and frequency.
(in mash you have 2 instancing modes “repromesh” basically a single mesh and the real instancing mode like with the particles, you were probably on the repromesh)
create a noise texture, or fractal if you want and connect the alpha to translate Y.
now in the noise node you have some parameters amplitude etc you can play with them to see the behavior, also you will have to animate the time parameter, you can type “=time” this will quickly create an expression based on time.
you can also connecte the time node into it or keyframe it.
But i insist you won’t get near the control you have with the signal node, also you have a trigonometry mode in it if you really want a sin function.
i tried pluging in time into the noise node but got no animation out of it…
I will test the signal node out
so I opened your scene, hit play… nothing happens… tried tweaking values on the signal node, still nothing.
yup, have that exact setup in the scene file you sent me.
I’m running maya 2018 update 4
first make sure to have the time node connected to the signal node
Also make sure that in your distribute node you have at least 1 point
you might also try do switch maya evaluation from parallel to DG or the inverse just to be sure but it should work on both
im using the scene you sent me to try and get this working, so the setup should be identical to the one that you made.
I have already tried switching the evaluation. makes no change
strange, working fine here.
hard to tell what’s going on from here but try to rebuild the thing from the start on a fresh new scene it’s just few nodes.
