Comments on: djFileSwitchRamp.mel & djPopulateSingleSwitch.mel

By: agenesis

agenesis — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:18:39 +0000

Hi David,

Sorry I did not get back to you with my thanks earlier ... I just checked back in now.

Your original script came in handy big time over the summer, thanks a million for that, and also for looking into the instancing scenario. I'm grabbing a copy of it now and will test it out as soon as I can.

As usual your blog is awesome. I look forward to seeing more soon.

Best Regards,

Matt

By: agenesis

agenesis — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:18:39 +0000

Hi David,

Sorry I did not get back to you with my thanks earlier ... I just checked back in now.

As usual your blog is awesome. I look forward to seeing more soon.

Best Regards,

Matt

By: david

david — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:01:21 +0000

agenesis: I finally got some time to look into the instance question. I have added an extra script to the rar download that seems to work. I have not had time to test it fully. Eventually I may combine the two scripts into one and add proper error checking, but this will have to do for now.

By: david

david — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:42:31 +0000

agenesis: It took me a while to be able to look into your question. In the populateSingleSwitch script objects are assumed to be transformNodes above a single shapeNode, and this assumption breaks when instances are involved. The technique can certainly work with instances, but the script would need some modifications. I will try to find time to do this in the next week or so.

By: david

david — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:26:03 +0000

To assign random id numbers to s selection of objects, you could select your objects and execute the following mel in the script editor, after changing the rand() statement to an appropriate range (in this example it will set a random integer between 0 and 100):

{
string $sel[] = `ls -sl`;
for ($s in $sel) {
int $rnd = rand(0,100);
setAttr ($s +".id") $rnd;
}
}

It gets a bit more complicated if you need to deal out the numbers randomly, but like a deck of cards, where each number will only be used once. Let me know if that's what you needed.

As for instances... I'm not sure. If I get some time I'll give it a try and let you know.

By: agenesis

agenesis — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:28:08 +0000

is there a way to get this to work with instances?

By: agenesis

agenesis — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:35:34 +0000

Hi David,

Awesome script! I'm new to MEL, do you know how to randomly assign a selection of objects different ID nodes, so that the assignment of all the file textures through the switch node and onto the geo is chosen randomly?

By: rusty

rusty — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:18:38 +0000

Nice work david,

We've used this method to assign random leaf textures to a forest we've made. Hundreds of leaves - one shader. Awesome.

By: medooch

medooch — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:35:35 +0000

Hey David,

This post saved me a bunch of work on a recent project...

Thanks a lot!

Oryan