Linking values and/or linking animation files.

Started by bigben, March 28, 2007, 12:34:39 AM

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bigben

More of a feature request/suggestion than anything else.

Having come up with some useful masking combinations to reduce the RAM usage while rendering I now have the task of applying these to other projects. Doing this from scratch, or modifying an existing project seems to be unnecessarily inefficient, and with a complicated node network can require some documentation of which settings are linked.  There are a couple of things that would make this easier.

1: Being able to link equivalent values from the same shader type. e.g. Camera X position for camera 1 is read from camera X position for camera 2

2: Associating a setting with an animation file.  Rather than just importing settings into TG from a text file, it would be nice if the filename could also be (optionally) linked to be re-read when the file opens (or left unchanged if the file is missing)

This would help to reuse data in multiple shaders and also make it easy to locate and change data without having to navigate through the node network.

3: The ability to export settings as well as import them. e.g. relocate camera, set camera, export positions to text file. If this file were linked to parameter values as well (as in point 2) this would provide a means of linking values together to some extent. For practical reasons you'd probably use all values from a parameter for this, while some internal links with a single value would be useful as well.

example 1. I have image masks and populations which move with the camera. Linking their position to the camera X,Y,Z would work in this case.

example 2. I have an image mask projected through a camera directly above the render camera at a fixed height so I only need to link the camera's X,Z values. In this case it would also be nice to be able to feed the values through a function node so that the mask camera's Y was XXXm above the render camera's Y. Getting this into the GUI could be awkward but there could be some potential for progressively identifying linked values via an xml ID e.g. <node name>.<parameter name>.<sub_parameter name (where present)> rather than putting lots of inputs nodes on every object in the node network.