Clear Material Connections

[jiggyfresh]

given a material node, eg. blinn, how do I break a connection in MEL?

to create lower quality versions of assets, i'm shrinking down file textures and removing bump and spec from all materials.

to do this manually, you go to the material, go next to the attribute, eg. bump, and right click -> break connection.

in the script editor, it uses disconnectAttr. The problem with this command is that i need both the input and output attributes to complete the arguments for the command. for bump, for example, it shows:
"disconnectAttr bump2d3.outNormal blinn1.normalCamera"

i've also tried deleteAttr without success. i'm going to look into listConnections and see if that leads anywhere. any help is appreciated!

[naughty]

well you already have all the details you need right there..? or is your problem that you don't know how to query the connected names?

yeah, listConnections is the answer.

you need to get a list of all your materials, iterate through them one by one with a for..loop, then you need to list the connections, but return the plug names and both sides of the connection:

listConnections -p 1 -c 1 -type "file" blinn1;
listConnections -p 1 -c 1 -type "bump2d" blinn1;

then you can do a disconnectAttr on these returned values.

can you figure out the rest from this..?

:nathaN

[jiggyfresh]

thanks for the help!

I discovered that deleting the material/file that a channel was connected to would break the connection, so instead of your method, which totally works, I ran a loop that deleted any procedural material.

then for the files that were linked to non-.color input, i did indeed use your method. except instead of disconnectAttr, i used delete again.

thanks again!