Max Path Deform Binding spline -- Maya Equivalent?

Alex_J

I am watching Georgian Avasilcutei's realtime hair tutorial, and he uses a tool in max called a Path Deform Binding which gives good control when bound to hair cards. It has inbuilt attributes allowing for scaling the spline, stretching it, twisting, and so on. Seems very useful. 

I know Maya must have an equivalent tool, and I have read that Maya does has not 1:1 tools but something better existing in the curves shelf (from a forum post almost a decade old). However, I can't seem to find such a tool, not after a few hours of searching anyway. I know how to extrude geometry along curves, how to loft geometry from curves, but I can't find a way to bind geometry to a curve, and have those nice attributes for editing the curve. I suppose it is possible to create my own attributes, but the whole purpose of this is to save time, and there's got to be something already existing.

Anybody know of such a tool, or an alternate method with similar level of control inside Maya?

poopipe

There's a deformer I used and wasnt satisfied with for what I was doing. 

I think it's called line deformer

For hair cards though you should take a look at xgen - it's not great for super low poly work but for the sort of mid range stuff you see in tutorial videos it works very well

Alex_J

Oh really? I thought xgen was a movie level only type of thing. Ideally, I'd like to stick with things I can use in Maya LT, as I only have a student license of the full Maya, but I'll check xgen out anyway just to see what can be done with that.