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does anyone knows how to customize the fields volume shape attribute.
Only if you make your own node with your own code. But you can accomplish the same thing by painting a static fluid container tough.
QUOTE(einumel @ 04/30/09, 03:36 PM) [snapback]307077[/snapback]
lets say you have a mesh and youd like to connect its shape to the volume shape attribute of a field.
is this possible?
Not with default maya tools. Also its a bit problematic, as the editable shape types define surfaces, and not volumes so they don't work out very well as sources for volume sampling. And they wouldn't describe the interior of the volume in any sane way. (just like a single curve is bad at describing a surface, but a number of them can be interpolated to one)
While testing if your inside a volume spanned by a surface is quite easy, its also computationally horribly expensive (because it uses raytracing). So one would need to develop some sort of acceleration structure as well as a whole lot fo other stuff on exactly how the user would do this.
Now presumably you'd end up voxelizing the thing somehow. In which case you could just paint in a volume field with the fluid tools instead. Now one culd automate the population of teh voxel field based on shape and then shape it more later. But for this youd need a few extra auxilliary nodes, many lines of mel or your own api code.