 | | | programmatically accessible many to many relationships | programmatically accessible many to many relationships 2005-03-04 - By softimage@(protected)
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One simple way to handle this could be to attach annotations to objects that
will list the related objects. Once in a while you would have to update these
lists with a script. Not very elegant from a technical perspective but if you
remember to update lists that could work.
Cheers
Bernard
Quoting Brad Friedman <xsibrad@(protected)>:
> 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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