Showing/Hiding Geo using Operators

[Anonymous]

I've got an .ass archive and in it, for example, I have a man and 3 sets of clothing geo. I'm then instancing these to points. Is it possible to use operators to show/hide the clothing within the ass archive? Essentially I want to make one ass for each character with all of their respective clothing options rather than make one ass for each combo.

[Stephen.Blair]

Yes, you can set the visibility to 0 with a set_parameter operator.
Or disable the shapes with a disable operator.

[Anonymous]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for the swift reply. I'm confused as to what goes in the 'selection' parameter. Say I have an instance node (called INSTANCES) which has some points scattered within it. Each of those points has an s@instancefile attribute which points to the .ass file. That .ass file as 3 geos in it. What would go in the Operator 'selection' parameter?

[Stephen.Blair]

You can use the name of the geo.

For example, if I have this in my ass file:

polymesh
{
 name /obj/torus_object1/polygons

then I select

*/obj/torus_object1/polygons

Because operators work on Arnold nodes, you need to use the names of the Arnold nodes.
The asterisk is required because when you use s@instancefile, what you get is an Arnold procedural node that loads the ass file. And you can use * in place the actual name of the procedural node.

[Anonymous]

That's great, thanks.

Is there a way of naming the polygons or alembic something more user friendly than a number? i.e. in my .ass file I've got /obj/geo/assfile/polygons:1353306 or /obj/geo/assfile/alembic:32

[Stephen.Blair]

No, I'm afraid the naming is all automatically done by HtoA.
But you could use the user data _obj_path to simplify the selection.
For example, I have this:

polymesh
{
 name /obj/torus_object1/polygons
 #...
 declare _obj_path constant STRING
 _obj_path "/obj/torus_object1"
}

So I could select */obj/torus_object1