Container Interactions

[mottosso]

Container Interactions

[mottosso]

Some food for thought.

Assets are ultimately connected from one to the other, similar to nodes in a network of nodes.

 _________________________        _________________________ 
|                         |      |                         |
o input            output o----->o input            output o
|                         |      |                         |
|                         |      |                         |
|                         |      |                         |
|_________________________|      |_________________________|
 1000.MyCharacter01               Bruce.lookdevDefault

So, how about representing them as such, visually as a node graph?

[mottosso]

Yet another thought about this.

Slots

Rather than facilitate an arbitrary connection between any two assets, which may lead to complexity and potential over-engineering, how about establishing a few pre-defined connections, like slots.

In this example, a character is pre-defined with exactly two inputs, and may have only one input connected to any one asset. This makes sense, it couldn't have more than a single look, nor a single fur set-up.

What this enables us to do is establish relationships between assets (as per #129) with less explicit information.

{
  "Asset1": {
    "inputs": ["myFurSetup/12", "myLook/15"]
  }
}

Here the destination for each input is implied by their type. The character provides an input for the types "look" and "fur", and any fur or look looking to connect only has one place to go.

Set-up and configuration could potentially look like this.

api.register_input(
  source="mindbender.look",
  destination="mindbender.animation",
  connect=look_to_animation)

Where look_to_animation could be a function accepting the two assets as parameters.

def look_to_animation(source, destination):
  assert "out_SET" in source
  assert "in_SET" in destination

  for input, output in zip(source["in_SET"], source["out_SET"]):
    connect(input, output)

Where connect is a generic function taking two absolute path to two objects and making a connection. In Maya, that may take the form of cmds.connectAttr.