For a few years I am also active in bifrost for maya. This plugin adds very nicely to the scripting, and I often use both in combination.
For those who are not familiar with bifrost, it´s a method to script on a node based system within maya, allowing access to in depth geo details. So far I used it on scattering a lot (E.g. on Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania or Damsel). But it can do much more…
MASH to Bifrost
MASH is a older motion graphics tool, which offers several modules to quickly do scattering. As far as I can tell it is no longer developed but still in use by many artists.
The tkMASHtoBifrost script makes it possible to translate MASH to the actual bifrost, so it might be useful for you. You can find it for free in the download section.
Feathers
Lately I experimented with houdini 20 and its feather template. This is achieved by simply drawing shaft, side and profile curves. There are some feather compounds in bifrost already, and I also did one a long time ago. But it was much less intuitive. Therfor I thought it might be worth another try and creating a better version.
Beside the main compound I added a small UI for quick connecting the shape curves to the graph.
Just released the first version including reworked script and compound. The UI is now structured and all important attributes are directly accessable at top level.
Recently updated my feathers template. Version 1.3
– barbs improvement
– noise offset added
– chaos added
– diagnose added
– baldness added
Features can be seen here, download for free at my download section.
– speed
– dynamic clumping
– dynamic barb distribution
– randomized and controllable baldness
– barbules
Apart from a walkthrough I posted two other showcases to demonstrate how to use the tool.
Compounds and scripts can be found on my download section.
I experimented with my fea compound collection to add feathers to a groom system. This showcases the current state and demonstrates how I generate feathers to create many variations.
