Newbie Question: What does "DAG" mean?

[daveprout]

Anybody know?

[gmask]

From the Maya Glossary a DAG is a Directed Acyclic Graph.

[deane]

I'm sure that helped

[joojaa]

Directed acyclic graph is a facy way of saying that the uotput of the node is allways explicit regarding to the summed up channels of the entire tree its structured in.

Example a child object cant tell its parent to move to position x based on its internal values sice this could cause a infinite loop!

[daveprout]

Not quite

Dave Prout
Lead Artist
Spark Unlimited, Inc.

[digihart]

the definition above doesn't seem, to me anyway, to gell with the concept of having an Acyclic (not cyclic) dependency graph structure, which would not really appear like a tree in that way. In other words, can't a given node be instanced to have more than one parent and exist in more than one hierarchy?

[joojaa]

Yes some nodes can but not DAG (not all nodes in maya are deg nodes open the outiner and toggle dag nodes only and not to se what i mean, buut the important ones are) nodes wich must have a direct line to its ancestor. This is done so that the calculation is one way and totaly predictable, Because if it.

Thsi doesent mean a dag node cant inherit information from two parents (altoug they seldom do), but the parents themselves cant have any inputs froma any nodes taht are their children. If they could then he results would in most cases be catastrophic, calculation nightmares. (hey thats what we have dynamics and particles for!)