time offset with alembic expression

[Gary Jaeger]

Trying to figure this one out. Admittedly I’ve never been good with maya expressions.

Let’s say I have an alembic node, alembic1. I want to do be able to do 2 things:

- duplicate special to make multiple copies of the node (if you just Duplicate you end up with a static mesh)
- give each one a custom time offset (can do by hand)
- have them all be connected to a global time offset so I can shift them all around globally

so the attribute I need is alembic1_AlembicNode.offset

My thought was to declare some global variable that I can use as the offset and add an attribute to the first alembic node (before I duplicate) as the local time offset. Adding and attribute is no problem, but I get hung up on the syntax for the global. And will that get duplicated if I Duplicate Special > Duplicate Input Graph?

thanks!

Gary Jaeger // Core Studio
249 Princeton Avenue
Half Moon Bay, CA 94019
650 728 7060
http://corestudio.com

[Dylan Neill]

I would usually create a controller object (like a curve or a locator) and add the global offset attribute to that. I may even be easier to add all the local offsets to this object too depending on how many objects we're talking about. Then you can edit them all in one place.

Otherwise doing what you're talking about will work too. You will just have to make sure your duplicated objects are looking at the original object to get their global offsets. So your frame expression would be:

=frame+firstObject.globalOffset+thisObject.offset

or if you're using a controller object for everything:

=frame+controller.globalOffset+controller.object3Offset

[matt estela]

I had to do a similar thing recently, I found the soup timeoffset node made it very easy, or beyond that, the copier node.

http://www.tokeru.com/mayawiki/index.php?title=Soup#Timeoffset

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[Gary Jaeger]

That’s cool. Thanks Dylan and Matt. Actually I just brute forced it and made a new attribute, connected it's animation curve to Time and offset everything in the curve editor. But your solutions are cleaner.

Gary Jaeger // Core Studio
249 Princeton Avenue
Half Moon Bay, CA 94019
650 728 7060
http://corestudio.com