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98 Chapter 3: Selecting Objects
Using Assemblies
Object on the right is an assembly and is treated as a single
entity.
Assemblies are useful for creating combinations
of geometry and light objects that act as lighting
fixtures; you use them to represent the housing of
a lamp and its light source or sources. You can use
assemblies to represent lighting fixtures such as
simple desk lamps, lighting strips, track systems,
wall sconces with fluorescent or incandescent
lights, chandelier systems , line voltage cable
systems, and so on.
When you create light assemblies, first you create
your objects and build a hierarchy, then set joint
parameters and assign inverse kinematics (IK)
(page 2–435). As a final step, you assemble the
object hierarchy. The lights you use in the assembly
have light-m ultiplier and filter color controls. You
w ire (page 2–411) the Dimmer and Filter Color
parameters of the Luminaire helper object to the
parameters of the light s ources that are members
of the light assembly.
Note: InordertowiretheLuminairecontrolstothe
light parameters, you must first open (page 1–109)
the assembly; then, after wiring, you close (page
1–109) it.
You can use IK to point a luminaire’s beam by simply moving
the light’s target object.
Assemblies and Gr oups
Assembly functionality is a superset of grouping
(page 1–96). Like grouping, creating an assembly
lets you combine two or m ore objects and t reat
them as a single object. The assembled object
is given a name, and then treated much like any
other object.
Themaindifferencewithassembliesisthat,
when you assemble (page 1–107) the member
objects, you specify a head object (page 1–111):a
Luminaire helper object (page 1–111).Thehead
object acts as a front end for the assembly, and its
parameters appear in the Modif y p anel when the
assembly is selected. You can use these par ameters
to control the ligh t sources in the assembly via
parameter w ir ing (page 2–411).Youcancreate
other types of head objects with MAXScript;
for further information, open the MAXScript
Reference,availablefromtheHelpmenu,andlook
in Creating MAXScript Tools > Scripted Plug-ins
> Scripted Helper Plug-ins.
Assembly names are sim ilar to object names,
except that they’re carried by the a ssembly. In lists
like the one in the Select Object dialog, assembly
names appear in s quare brackets, for example
[Assembly01].
Tip: After you’ve created one fixture and assembled
the parts, u se instancing (page 3–957) to copy (page
1–471) the fixture, and then distr ibute them in
your scene. That way, if you change the attributes