Inputs

[ydiaz]

Hi interstella,

maya allows you to connect any output to any input as long as they have the same type, meaning floats, vectors, etc. Think about shading networks, usually you connect several nodes into a single material node to create the shader.

Regards,
Y.

[gozzer]

I was always under the notion that you could only have one input for a node, but many outputs. But I noticed in the hypergraph that I could connect many inputs
into a constraint node. can somebody explain this???

As far as my logic tells me, any 1 input can only be ultimately driven by 1 connection at any given time. I know Maya lets you connect several outputs to the same input under certain conditions -- constraints being one of them -- but I'm reasonably sure that they are averaged out before actually set to drive your input node.

I.e. you want the X-value of 3 spheres to drive the X-value of 1 cube. You can connect all of these spheres to your cube's .tx through a (point) constraint, but ultimately only one actual number will be passed to it. In this case, the average X-value of the 3 spheres. If you were somehow able to connect all 3 (different) X-values at once, without any buffering/averaging, you would have one veeeeery confused cube on your hands.

If this post makes little sense, rest assured that it was all very clearly defined in my head when I wrote it, and that my sloppy fingers must have betrayed me.

Cheers,
Daniel

[isoparmB]

They're called multi attributes. They're attributes which can expand based on available data, such as the target attribute on constraints, or cvs on a nurbs curve. These can usually accessed via the [ ] symbols. It's easier to think of it as an attribute with many sub compartments than as a single attribute that accepts multiple connections.

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