"Variable variable names"?

Introduction to Maya - Modeling Fundamentals Vol 1

This course will look at the fundamentals of modeling in Maya with an emphasis on creating good topology. We'll look at what makes a good model in Maya and why objects are modeled in the way they are.

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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