Mainframe North releases Mash 3.3 for Maya
Mainframe North has released Mash 3.3, the latest update to its versatile set of motion graphics nodes for Maya, making the software officially available on Linux as well as Windows and Mac OS X.
Shortlisted for last year’s 3D World CG Awards, Mash provides a set of 27 nodes that can be ‘daisy chained’ together to generate customisable effects. It can be controlled from both Maya’s Attribute and Node Editors.
The tool is entirely procedural, so the results can be adjusted live in the viewport.
New features in the 3.x releases
Since we last covered Mash, back during the 2.x series of releases, Mainframe has introduced support for Viewport 2.0 in Maya 2015, and streamlined workflow, both further improving performance.
There are also several new features, including Dash, a new scripting tool intended to speed up repetitive tasks; Blend and Jiggle deformers; and Blend, Replicator and Transformer nodes.
Each node type can support multiple Falloff nodes, and any 2D map (including images, ramp and noise maps) can be used as a strength map to control a node network. Users can also now save node set-ups as presets.
The 3.3 release doesn’t add many new features – it’s mainly a UI refresh – but it does officially introduce Linux support. It’s developed for CentOS, but if you can run Maya on your flavour of Linux, Mash should also work.
Pricing and availability
Mash 3.3 is available for Maya 2012+ on 64-bit Windows and Mac OS X 10.7+, and for Maya 2015 on Linux. A licence costs £89.99 (around $140), and lets you create three installations of the software.
Read a full list of new features in the 3.x releases of Mash