Deform a standin?

[Anonymous]

Hi all, I'm wondering if it's possible to deform a polymesh inside an arnold standin by influencing it's vlist via an operator in Maya. Eg...

I export a standin of a single square polygon, imaginatively (and humorously) called 'square.ass'. I create an aistandin node and reference my new file. Add light, hit render and there's my square.

Now I add an operator, specify squareShape as the selection and under assignment add visibility=0. Hey presto, when I render my square I can toggle this value and my square appears and disappears.

Presumably I can do the same with the vlist property, overiding it to move the points of my square around. But I can't get this to work.

Ultimately I was wondering is you could use this method to drive a standin with vertex location data extracted from an alembic file. But I can't seem to get over the initial hurdle of deforming in any way.

Any thoughts or comments appreciated.

[Stephen.Blair]

After shape nodes are initialized, Arnold removes the original geometry specification (because there's an optimized internal representation). vlist is probably not around anymore by the time the operators are initialized