[Closed] Can you animate a string to change over time?

dont think I can help you but I would like to know why you want to do this if you dont mind saying

nebille,

I made a short test with a script-controller to change the name of a object and surprise max crashed.

This is due to node – name – dependecy.
[–Paste more elaborate explanation here –]

Maybe you could change a custom attribute of the object represeting its name?

Georg

Well d

I want to animate a string because i am trying to build a vray proxy object animation tool. I have an animated object over 200 frames and have created a vray proxy for each frame of the animation. Now i need to be able to write a script that allows me keyframe the file name so that when i send the file to render over the network the filename changes over time thus loading a different proxy on each frame change.

hope this helps .

thanks guys

nebille

Ok. I misunderstood you question.

If get it right you need a array containing all possible objectnames – or a function that generates the correct object name based on time.

In a prerender-script you could then reference the new proxy object.
Or you place a not renderable dummy object an place a scriptcontoller in some of its properties.

As I don’t have access to vray I can’t help you with this …

Georg

thanks G

I will investigate your aproach futher

much appreciated

kind regards

Nebille

This is still only part of the equation… you might be able to use a note track… you can make note keyframes on each frame of the note track, then set the notes to hold whatever naming information you want for each frame. To add a note track to the global tracks, you can use the dope sheet, select global tracks on the left, then the Tracks Menu > Note Track > Add, drop in some keys along your note track, then right clicking on the note keyframes will let you edit their values.

      Once you've set up all your notes, you could use the following line to grab the value for a particular keyframe from inside your prerender script (in this case, it retrieves the value of the 1st keyframe):

           (getNoteTrack globalTracks 1).keys[1].value
          

      This note track method might be kind of nice, because it allows you to retain the naming information within the max file itself and edit this information easily from the dope sheet. Unfortunately I can't help with the other piece of the equation that rdg mentioned (the prerender script), because I don't have vray either :-/

I hope this helps,