zStringFormatter
Module: zStringFormatter

Introduction

Use cases

• Dynamic texture filenames
  By formatting a filename string and connecting it to the file attribute of a file node, you can dynamically control which texture is loaded. For example, you can have a "textureQualityLevel" attribute on a global control with a value of 1-3, create a zStringFormatter for each texture that formats a string such as "head q%i.png", and connect the output to a file node.

  You can then select whether "head q1.png", "head q2.png" or "head q3.png" is used with the control, or even animate the control to change the texture over time.

• Export dynamic EXR attributes with Arnold
  Arnold can export custom attributes when rendering EXR files, but this is controlled with string attributes, giving no way to export scene data. This can be done with zStringFormatter by connecting to the defaultArnoldDriver.custom_attributes array, and formatting a string such as "INT attributeName %i".

  This allows exporting the current value of animated properties to EXR metadata, to make it available to postprocessing scripts.

Usage

In the attribute editor, add entries to the inputIntEntries, inputFloatEntries or inputStringEntries arrays, and set a name to use in the format string. Set a value or connect it to a source attribute.

Set the format string. Each input value's name will be available for substitution. For example, if an inputIntEntries exists with a name of "frame", the value can be substituted with the format string "%(name)i".

See String Formatting Operations in the Python documentation for full details about string formatting. Some examples:

%(name)i	an integer	1
%(name)03i	an integer padded to 3 digits	001
%(name)f	a float	1.5
%(name)s	a string	hello

Attributes

• format - The format string.
• output - The resulting formatted string.
• inputFloatEntries, inputStringEntries, inputIntEntries - Arrays of entries for substitution.