Metaballs in Maya?

[sketchguy]

Hello! I need to create a variety of cartoony, chocolatey splashes for a cereal spot. Aside from dropping $4K on Real Flow, is there any way to create easily editable metaballs with Maya 2011 OS X? I'm looking for functionality similar to what the old Softimage 3d metaball system offered - interactive blobby update preferable. I thought I saw somewhere that a liquid water attribute can be applied to nParticles? Are there any tutorials here that deal specifically with this?

Thanks for any ideas and/or suggestions!

-Steve

[dan]

Hello sketchguy! I can definitely understand why you'd want to try what's in Maya before spending money on something like RealFlow. I'd start by looking into nParticles and going that route. What your project requires will obviously determine what exactly you use, but here's a quick video on some of the really cool things you can do with nParticles:

Here's a link to the nParticles in Maya 2009 course that was referenced in the video. And you can download the scene file I used for the video if you'd like: metaballs_end.zip

[sketchguy]

Dan!

Wow, thanks for the quick reply! This looks promising. I'm basically interested in setting up something similar for an impact splash - so, you'd only see the blobby particles once an object makes impact. WIll let you know what route I end up taking.

Thanks again,

-Steve

[nicktheseal]

Hey guys, somebody know , how can i control de metaballs like C4D? check this tutorial..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtwt9...eature=related

thanks!!

[sketchguy]

I should also mentioned that I fooled around a bit with trying out dynamic booleans:



And then this plug-in was brought to my attention:

http://sayinghai.com/metaballs3d.html

I'm inquiring to see if the developer has an OS X 64-bit version compiled for Maya 2011

-Steve

[plafStar]

I am trying to do exactly as the second video shows (metaballs / dynamic booleans), however the link provided does not work anymore.
Is there another resource or video to help show how to set this up?

I want to use this to animate cell fusion.