I've got a model that I've been working on that uses a lot of greebles. Currently I have the greebles in their own Scene subnet, and then each greeble component in it's own geo container. When I use them I just object merge them into the current geometry, and transform and merge them in. What is a hassle is that if I want ot insert one, I need to traverse up the network, look the various greebles (I've got about 50 so far), pick one, remember the name, then go back to where I was, and object merge it in.

What would be really nice to have is a DA that I can plop in, where I can pick the greeble number, and then pull in that greeble, and maybe a scale factor as well. What would be the best way to do something like this? Would I just build one DA with all 50 networks in it, and then just pick one? Would that be really “expensive” memory wise?

Right now I am a bit lost on what your trying to do. A scene file can really help showing your structure.

Rob

circusmonkey
Right now I am a bit lost on what your trying to do

Wee, and I thought that it's my lack of english language knowledge.

Jim, once again and a little slower for us, non english by default .

Glad I am not alone.

:shock:

OK, here's a sample hip file of what I have now (no DA). I've trimmed down the number of greebles to save space and made a little example that just uses one of them. Each greeble object is named g1, g2, gN. What I'd like to do is create a DA that would somehow contain all the greebles (g1-gn) and by entering a number, or maybe a drop down, I could pick which of the greebles would actually get output by the DA.

So the question is how do I do this? What's the best way to contain all the different possible geo shapes, but only output one? If you put all the various networks into a DA, but only use one of them in the output, do the unused ones still consume memory? My concern is that if I do that it will get unwieldy having all these things around in a scene where you're using hundreds of them.

DA cannot be modified inside, but it can create geo ouside. I mean, you can make DA from 7 nulls, add python scripts that will create geo outside HDA, each null different, that you pick in your greeble node HDA. And this created geo will be parented to your master node also.

Just a thought.

Hi,
I take it all these greebles are in fact bits of geometry and you want to create a DA that gives a list which you can pick from ? .

If this is the case whats wrong with writing out all the geometry bits to disk and using a file sop to read in the geo as you need it off disk.

rob

Writing each greeble out as a geometry file is probably the best way to go.

You could just place a bunch of bgeo files in a directory and then have an asset that created a menu based on all the files in that directory so you could choose which ones you wanted. It would also be fairly easy and straight forward to update them or add new ones.

try something like this

add it to your scene and attach it to xform1

change the object merges to file reads…