Maya Plugin Power: Miscellaneous Tools Stitching with Seamour

In the latest excerpt from Maya Plugin Power, author Mark Jennings Smith shows readers how to create stitching effects using Seamour plugins from ticket01.

By AWN | Monday, September 7, 2009 at 12:51 pm

Posted In | Magazines: VFXWorld | Site Categories: Books, CG, Education and Training

In Stitches
Seams in Seamour have a few basic components. The first is a user-designated or designed curve that can be made from polygon edges or that is drawn. The template defines the overall shape of the individual stitches, making them look similar to a staple. The yarn profile is the circular curve that is extruded over the template curve, creating the actual surface of each stitch. These components are tweaked in the Attribute Editor of the seam node to shape the stitching that suits your needs.

Let’s create a few more stitches to tighten it up a bit. In the Seam tab of the Attribute menu, change the Stitches value to 70. This creates a tighter cluster of stitches plus an errant one. This is the first stitch in the series, so we can eliminate it by changing the value of Start with Stitch to 2 or, in other words, starting with the second stitch in the sequence.

The stitching looks a bit crowded. Let’s bump the Yarn Profile to 0.09 and change the Template Scale to 0.084. Our stitchery should now look something like Figure 9.

Finally, a few shaders are included in this scene file. The tan shader labeled phongE1SG can be found in the Multilister. Drag this shader onto your stitching geometry and render it. The nice uniform stitching is fairly convincing, as shown in Figures 10 and 11.

[FIGURE 9] Readjusting scales and the number of stitches makes a better-looking seam.

[FIGURE 10] A render of the stitches as geometry. [FIGURE 11] A closer look at the Seamour stitchery.

Mark Jennings Smith is a seasoned artist, animator and writer residing in Beverly Hills, CA. Smith has been fascinated by CG since 1972, when at age 10 a chance encounter with the first coin-op Pong changed his life. His interest in the entertainment field led Smith and a partner to establish Digital Drama in 1994, which focused on computer-generated imagery, animation, digital painting and special digital visual effects. Digital Drama designed the digital film effects and animation for companies such as Universal Pictures, Trimark Pictures, Fox Home Ent., HBO and Showtime. Smith has contributed to several books and magazines, including a chapter in Maya: Secrets of the Pros. He also created cover art for the book and a variety of other titles in the 3D arena. He served as the technical editor for Mastering Maya Complete 2 as well as consulted and beta-tested dozens of software packages. Smith has also taught visual effects and computer animation using Maya at New York University.