child object with multiple parents
 

In the book by name "MEL scripting for Maya animators" by Mark R Wilkins and Chris kazmier, he has mentioned in one of his introductory pages that there is an option in maya where in we can parent a single object to multiple objects ... in simple words, a single child having multiple parents. I know this sounds wierd but if anyone knows what it means, i'd like to know bout it. It's something to do with instancing the child object n blah blah blah ....

:bgreen: I want to know very badly

cheers

Mark is actually a frequenter here at SM in the MEL forum. You can contact him through his book site:

Mel for Maya Animators

If he gives you an answer, please post it in this thread as it would be good to know. I was thinking there would be a simple way to do it through connections in the hypergraph but can only seem to make the typical parent multiple child relationships, not the other way around.

After a little more research, I believe you can do it through API/DAG (Directed Acrylic Graph). There's some documentation on it in the Developer's Toolkit section of Maya's manual but it's a bit too cryptic to me.

I think he just talks about duplicating with instancing.

Let's say we have a pSphere1 and we instance it. Now we have pSphere1 and pSphere1. These both are transform nodes which share the same shape node: pSphereShape1.

So in this example pSphereShape1 has two parents: pSphere1 and pSphere1.

Yeah .... after reading the explaination once again in the book, i realized what he was talking of was "a child node with multiple parent nodes" (which is excactly what happens when we create instances as mentioned by KBrown above) rather than "a child object with multiple parent objects" (which is impossible i believe).

Anyways ... thanx a lot guys for replying for my post ...

cheers