Hi again! This week I want to show you my Direction-Velocity Node for Maya.

Utility

It is a C++ node that connected to an animated object it calculates its direction (or opposite direction) and velocity. This node is useful for simulation tricks. For example in the case you want to simulate wind related to the direction of the object, or you want to measure the velocity of the object to tigger at some point another acction.

Attributes

In the deformer I developed you have the following options:

-Input Mesh: the input mesh is connected to the node, so the node can calculate the direction and the velocity.
-Direction: this is the direction vector. It indicated the directional quantity of the mesh, in the current frame, taking in account the position of the mesh in the previous and current frames.
-Velocity: this is the mesh velocity (how fast the object is moving) in the current frame.
-Reverse direction: this makes the inverse of the direction returned. Very useful in some cases, for example to apply wind in the inverse direction of the object movement (You can see in the demo)

Example

In the video above you can see two examples of this node.

In the first example we connect a cube animated, that is moving in the space, to the node. So we can see how the direction and the velocity is updated every frame.

In the second example the node is used for calculate the inverse direction of the object so it can be applied wind in the opposite direction. As you can see in the video we are using nCloth. We parented the nucleus to the object in movement in order to avoid the interfere of the object movement with the simulation.