Hello

I'm trying to use OBJ level animatable objects to drive setups in SOP level.

In XSI/ICE I would:
- Add nulls to a group.
- Get the group in ICE and access common parameters on those objects like an array from a get node where the returned data for example for “group1.Position” was an array of vectors of the positions of each null in the group.
- The group is ordered and if I change the group membership order of the nulls the array data reflects that.

I know I can get similar workflow with an Object Merge SOP, but I don't see a way to reasonably allow an artist to reorder the list of objects:
- If I use a @bundle the order is according to the object name, so this is not practical, because I don't want the user to have to rename objects either to control the initial order or for example to insert another object in bundle in the middle of existing objects (if I have c0,c1… c98, c99 and I want to have a new object after c50, I'll have to rename all from c51 onward to add 1 to their suffix.)
- If I simply add multiple objects in an Object Merge SOP is both cumbersome to do for a lot of objects and I can't change the order of them afterwards.
something like this would be handy, or if there were arrows in the entries


A OBJ level Merge node would be great since it simple allows to change the order of the inputs. Is there anything like this or some workflow I'm missing?


Cheers

What about using one Object Merge for each object and then using a Merge node to reorder them?

Hi tanto.
Multiple Object Merge SOPs could work, but not the workflow I was looking to offer on an asset. But it might end up being the way I do it in the end.

In a way I wish some move that are available in SOPs would also be available for OBJ in mind, since in this case one could maybe:

- With an OBJ Merge, the artist could just like the Merge SOP bundle many objects.
- With a OBJ Group one could use something like a expandobjgroup() to retrieve a list of obj names.
- An OBJ level wrangle to control transforms instead of having to go CHOPS.

Anyways, if anyone knows a better way to group objects and retrieve info from them in a ordered way, other than naming, let me know.

Thanks

Really interesting ideas Probiner!