SWN Overview
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SWN library

The procedures in the SWN library add the ability to reference Softimage objects, hierarchies and parts of hierarchies by their names. The naming convention is loosely patterned after file names. You can operate upon elements with or without regard to their locations in any hierarchies or their relationships to other elements.  For example:

h* represents every element whose name begins with an h.

head* represents every element whose name begins with head

Slashes are used to represent elements using their relationships (or lack thereof) to other objects. For example:
/h* represents every ROOT element whose name begins with h. (A root element is any element which does not have a parent, they form the bases of hierarchies).

/h*/* represents all the immediate descendants of all root elements whose names begin with h

h*/* represents all the immediate descendants of all elements whose names begin with h, no matter where in any hierarchy they are. Notice that since head1 and head2 are immediate descendants of hat they belong to this representation, as does torso, because it is an immediate descendant of head1.

torso/*/* represents all the children of all the children of the element named torso

torso/*/ represents all the children of torso and ALL their descendants, at any level.

So far we have dealt with elements in un-prefixed heirarchies. Now we will turn our attention to prefixed heirarchies. SWN treats prefixes like DOS drive letters. For example TOP:* represents the entire hierarchy prefixed with TOP

*:/h* represents every root element beginning with the letter h of ANY heirarchy which has a prefix. Note that this excludes heeirarchies which are unprefixed.

and *:h* represents every  element beginning with the letter h of any heirarchy which has a prefix no matter where in the heirarchy the element may be.

*eye represents all elements which end with "eye", no matter where in a heirarchy they be and no matter whether the heirarchy they are in has a prefix or not.

This naming scheme imposes no restrictions because Softimage does not allow element names to contain either the : or / characters (it transforms both to underscores).

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