hide an instance by particle ID

[john clausing]

i have a particle cloud with geo instances attatched to them.......

in some cases, i need to "hide" the instances and replace them with actual geometry.

normally, i would just delete these associated particles by ID, however, i still need the particles to generate pose information for the practicle geo and "constrain" them ("transform objects by particle") to the generated particles.

alternatively, i could plot the animation, then delete the particle, but i want to keep it all live.

is there anyway to selectively hide instanced geometry by ID?

thanks all,

john

[Alan Fregtman]

You could set their self.Shape to "Point" by testing their indices and they won't render (without a pointcloud renderer/shader.)

[john clausing]

that with a string and string array, worked perfectly.....

thanks as alway Alan.!

john

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From: Alan Fregtman <alan.f...@gmail.com>
To: john clausing <jclau...@yahoo.com>; soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2012 11:39 AM
Subject: Re: hide an instance by particle ID

[Alan Fregtman]

Happy to help! :)

If you want to restore the instance shape after, you could technically get self.Shape and set it to a custom attribute when you're setting your instance shapes, say self.OriginalShape, then when you wanna switch back to the instanceshape, read that custom attribute and set self.Shape with its data.

[Peter Agg]

How would it react to having the shape set as an empty polymesh? I know it used to insta-kill mental ray if you tried doing that, but is that still the case now we have the Empty Poly Mesh as an actual 'thing'?

[Alan Fregtman]

Should work I guess. I prefer the Point shape though; it's lighter.