 | | | programmatically accessible many to many relationships | programmatically accessible many to many relationships 2005-03-04 - By Brad Friedman
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I'm looking for a good way to manage programmatically accessible many to
many relationships.
In other words... I have a whole mess of meshes, curves, clusters and
nulls. I want any given object to be able to contain a list of any
number of other objects in the scene. I want the lists to remain valid
through object name changes.
In my specific application that I'm working through, I have curves that
are used as templates to create muscles. I have meshes with nulls as
children (mini rigs with constraints and scops and all that jazz) that
are the muscles. I have clusters on other meshes (character's envelope,
or skin) that need to be cage deformed to the muscle meshes.
I can set up the whole rig manually and it works great. But I'm looking
into extending my toolkit to sort of... regenerate the muscles and bind
the skin via cage deforms (and probably other methods while I'm at it)
procedurally. Because I'm finding a good amount of the work of tweaking
a muscle rig involves seeing how it deforms... then changing the
underlying muscle and re-binding the rig. Sometimes you want to build a
new muscle. Or Build 3 to replace the one. Sufficed to say, if I could
automate the skin binding process, this would go much quicker.
I'd like the skin clusters to maintain lists of muscle creation curves.
I'd like the muscle creation curves to maintain a list of muscles
created from them. The rest of the setup should be trivial. But I'm
kind of new to XSI scripting and programming so I'm not sure how best to
accomplish this without a name change messing the whole thing up.
I thought of using groups but unfortunately, groups don't seem to be
able to be properties of most objects... only models (is this correct)?
I thought of somehow throwing an array of strings on the objects which
would hold other object names... but then a name change breaks the whole
system.
In maya (I know I know... "groan... maya") I would approach this by
creating a named parameter of type "message" (which is basically a null
parameter type) with multiple connection capability [0-N]. Then I'd
just make connections willy nilly from other objects "message" ports to
the new parameters... resulting in nice easily workable many to many
relationships.
So... what is the best way to approach this kind of thing in XSI? I'm
sure there's a way. I've just not run into it yet. Can anyone point me
to a term or document that might help me find what I'm looking for?
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