This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2017 at 9:05.pm and is filed under Problem Solving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Storing shapes as messages (concept testing)
Problem: Storing a shape (not a transform) as a messaged connection.
Quick addendum to last week’s post. Ran into this on some rayCasting stuff (needed specific shape connection for updatable loc via stored uv data in dicts – more on that soon). My own googling and maya fiddling came up short with successfully connecting a shapes.message plug to a message attribute. It always connects to the transform. So, I pulled out my old method of attribute storing and it seems to be working okay.
If I wanted to store shape3 to messageHolder on an attribute of testMessage. It would look like this.
The connection works like this: shape3.viewName —-> messageHolder.testMessage.
The logic plays out as follows in our needed functions:
- Set message
- When it checks for attribute, component stuff from previous post, it now also checks for shape
- Instead of a message attribute, I use my copy_to function to copy an unassuming attribute found on shapes (‘viewName’) which then creates a new attribute on my messageHolder matching type and all so it’s connectable. That call also wires that connection
- Extra data is then stored as before
- Get message
- It checks a passed message attribute name for type. If it’s a string, it checks the plug flag on list connections for our above wiring
- Otherwise, it goes as before
Still testing but seems to be working for our purposes. We’ll see how it plays out.

