SOuP-Development

SOuP-dev.com is place where artists and programmers can come together to discuss and share ideas. Its purpose is to build new tools and develop existing ones and make them widely available to the user base. With this in mind, we invite you to join our community.

SOuP is a collection of nodes for Maya that are based on the principles of building a flexible, non-destructive procedural pipeline. Many of the nodes are designed to work at component level allowing the artist to extract specific data, alter it and pass it on. Its this level of design that allows SOuP nodes to work seemlessly within Maya's existing architecture.

Learning SOuP gives you insight on the inner workings of the dependency graph and how data flows from one node to the next. This knowledge is very powerful and gives you the ability to create effects and solve problems more efficiently whether you are using SOuP or not.

SOuP is freely available to download from the tools page. There is also a collection of pre-built Maya scenes to help get you started.

The SOuP project is developed and supported by Peter Shipkov. Contributors include Jeremy Raven, Maxim Kotrolev, David Schoneveld, Sergey Tsyptsyn, Ivan Turgeon, David Corral, Jack Straw and Michel Tuttle.
More are welcome.

Jimmy Gunnawan's blog is excellent source of resources and ideas. Recently he added a lot of SOuP related studies. http://mayaspiral.blogspot.com.au/

cocoon

Draw connections between points based on proximity. The node provides a lot of control over how the connection lines are drawn - inpit point cloud attributes can be mapped to the lines - color, transparency, thickness on both sides and along the lines, etc.

shell
A complex node for dealing with mesh shells. It can extract per-shell data or manipulate them by remapping data from input point cloud.

transformsToArrays - connect multiple transform nodes on the input and get position/rotation/scale/color/weight arrays on the output that can be connected to other SOuP and standard maya nodes that work with arrays.

pointCloudToMesh - generate mesh surface from provided point cloud, propagates positions, colors and normals from the input points to the mesh vertices.

tensionMapSimple - similar to the tensionMap node, but here we can provide explicit list of point pairs to calculate tension from. Each tension value can be remapped by corresponding ramp. Included are additional options for limiting, absolute values, etc.

resizeArray - trim or extend arrays on the fly

uninstancer - convert instancer data to "real" objects

tensionBlendShape - merged into the main build

NEW LOOK WEBSITE

Thanks to Cinemotion, SOuP-dev.com has a new clean look. We would also like to take the chance to say thanks again to all those who have donated money, this means we can keep the site up and running so we can keep developing and delivering more to you.

TSHIRT DESIGN

Well we just had to do it, our own Nodal SOuP tshirt. Perhaps in ten years time these things will infiltrate every single wardrobe on the planet and eventually become a household name...perhaps.
Go buy one :) www.zazzle.com