SOFTWARE: MAYA | MASH | ARNOLD
HOW TO USE SIMPLE MASH NETWORKS TO ACHIEVE TRULY RANDOMISED GEOMETRY DISTRIBUTION IN MAYA
Matt Burn explains:
Simple environmental elements – flowers distributed using a MASH network, combined with XGen grass primitives
“Randomisation is something that, as artists, the naked eye and human imagination simply cannot help but curate. We ‘free-willed’ beings cannot avoid making deliberate decisions while forming subconscious creative opinions during the artistic process. One could argue that we are ultimately incapable of generating something truly random, despite our best efforts. Luckily for us, computer software code isn’t limited by such instinctive deliberations.
In the context of CG, deliberate hand placement of environmental geometry inevitably leads to an unintentionally designed and considered aesthetic. We artists could sit there for hours trying to position objects by eye in a way that we think is random, but in truth it is not. No matter how hard we try, we’ll always struggle to emulate the truly random organic essence of mother nature. There is beauty to be found in chaos.