I am going through the MASH toolkit features one by one trying to see what it can do and hopefully find it useful. It looks like it has a lot to offer.
I was playing around with the MASH Blend Node.
I create a flat plane.
Duplicated it.
Offset the duplicates vtxs upwards.
Applied the “MASH Blend” on the first plane.
Connected the second one as a target.
Applied a “falloff object” to animate a wipe-on of the blend.
Unfortunately I started noticing some spikes where the “smooth” wipe-on was suppose to happen. Like some vertices were not being affected properly by the “falloff object”.
I tried it with some slightly more complex models.
Like a Cube that was Polysmoothed.
Duplicated and modified the shape a bit just like the plane in the previous example.
Applied the “MASH Blend” on the first Cube that was Polysmoothed.
Connected the second modified Cube as a target.
Applied a “falloff object” to animate a wipe-on of the blend.
Again random spikes!!
Tried it on a sphere and it worked…
I went back to the cube test, deleted all history. Did a REORDER of the vertices on both BASE and target.
Applied the “MASH Blend” and “falloff object” again.
Got less spikes but again it was still NOT perfect.
Tried all of the above with a “Map Helper” poly-plane and “UV mode” instead of a “falloff object” and this way it worked.
These issues occur in Maya 2017.4 and 2018.3. So it looks like it not a new issue.
It looks like there is a pretty obvious BUG with the MASH Blend Deformer when used with a “falloff object”. It only works in simple spheres or similar smooth primitive without scattered vtx order (such as what you get when you apply a polysmooth for example) from what I have tried so far.
The documentation with MASH is not the greatest. It is a bit incomplete and in certain parts it is inaccurate from what I can tell. Which is not very encouraging. I really hope it’s not more of the same of what Maya provides.
