"Variable variable names"?

Introduction to Maya - Modeling Fundamentals Vol 2

This course will look in the fundamentals of modeling in Maya with an emphasis on creating good topology. It's aimed at people that have some modeling experience in Maya but are having trouble with complex objects.

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# 1 09-02-2012 , 10:42 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Feb 2012

Posts: 1

I'm writing an expression to take care of a "chasing lights" effect. Each row of lights has its own surfaceShader, and the expression uses a sine wav to bring the lights' outColor up and down. So far so good.

The problem I'm encountering now is that I want to use a for loop to set each of the surfaceShaders with one expression. The loop works fine, but I have yet to figure out how to use the loop counter to "generate" the surfaceShader name, then feed that into an assignment statement.

Example: let's say I need to assign 1 to outColorR on 5 nodes, named testLight0, testLight1, ..., testLight4. Like this:

for ( $i =0; $i < 5, $i++) {

[?????].outColor = 1;
}

I've tried concatening $i to the end of a "testLight" string with the + operator, and no luck. Any ideas?
All I really need to know is how to turn a string into a reference to a node , I have the rest figured out.

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# 2 11-02-2012 , 01:55 AM

Lifetime Member
Join Date: Jan 2004

Posts: 99

Could you not use:

eval("testLight" + $i + ".outColor = 1");

Perhaps?

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# 3 13-02-2012 , 08:42 PM

Technical Director
Join Date: Feb 2004

Posts: 2,988

Why not just use a single shader, with a ramp connected to the incandescence, make the white cover a small portion, and have the rest black, and arrange the light UV's along a single line? That way you could just animate the uv placement node's position attribute, and you can create it with a single shader. No need for expressions. Just two keys user added image