Scene Assembly and Constraints

You can use constraints in your Scene Assembly workflows to constrain the position, orientation, or movement of assembly reference nodes and assembly reference members. Members of an assembly reference include nested assembly reference nodes and objects contained by Scene representations. Constraints created on assembly reference nodes and members behave the same way as constraints do when they are created on typical Maya objects and object hierarchies.

Using constraints with Scene Assembly, you can:

• Create constraints between assembly reference nodes, assembly references members, and objects outside the assembly reference hierarchy.
• Add constraints to assembly reference nodes and assembly reference members at any level in the Scene Assembly hierarchy.

  See Scene Assembly and constraint examples.

• Constrain assembly reference members to multiple target objects.

  See Scene Assembly and constraint node connections.

• Switch between representations of a constrained assemblyReference node without losing the constraint behavior.

  See Switching constrained representations.

Note: You cannot add constraints directly to Cache and Locator representations. Constraints applied to assemblyDefinition nodes do not persist when you reference the node into the scene. See Scene Assembly and constraint node connections.

When you constrain an assembly reference member, the constraint node appears in the Outliner under the constrained assembly reference members. As with constraints between typical Maya objects, the constraint node is a child of the constrained object. However, in the case of assembly references, the constraint node is not a member of the assembly reference.

Scene Assembly supports the following constraints:

• Aim constraints
• Orient constraints
• Parent Constraints
• Point constraints
• Geometry constraints
• Normal constraints