MASHing Cave Walls
An integral part of my scene is the cave walls that were inspired by the Fingal’s Cave in Scotland. These regular hexagonal basalt columns were formed in a lava flow millions of years ago. I think these are a unique naturally occurring geometric design that have an other worldly element to them.
In my preliminary Maya model concept I created these cave walls by hand. I started with one hexagonal column, replicated it number of times and placed each of them in a suitable orientation. This was really time consuming process and they didn’t have a random organic factor to them. In class, I found out about a process called MASH which could possibly aid me in my process. It was said that I could replicate any object as many times in the orientation that I wanted. So, I did a lot of research to educate myself on the capabilities of MASH.
To create my cave walls I used the following nodes in MASH:
I adjusted these nodes to a varying degree to create an inner, middle and outer cave wall layer. It was done in layers so that there was a natural gradation the cave walls. This can be seen in this top down view shown below.
The image below shows the cave walls from a perspective view.
