This is either a noob question or a feature request...
I find myself creating lots of colorized rectangles with carefully calculated properties (height, width, position, fill color, etc.) that change over the course of an animation. Other nodes often need access to those properties.
Of course I can just hook those other nodes to whatever node originally created each property. But this tends to create a big pile of spaghetti with all these other nodes reaching into the bowels of the original set of nodes. And this in turn makes it much more difficult to compartmentalize my node sets into subnetworks.
One workaround is to create lots of zip maps. Instead of creating the rectangles directly, I can create subnetworks that build zip maps with all the properties needed. To display the rectangles I can then do lookups for each property and feed those into the rectangle and colorize nodes. Other nodes needing these properties can do the same thing.
This reduces the spaghetti but forces me to add extra nodes to build each zip map and then more nodes to take it apart again.
What I wish I could do instead would be to make a single subnetwork that just spits out colored shapes. Any other node needing the properties could just swallow the finished shapes and interrogate them to recover whatever properties it needs.
The problem is that there doesn't seem to be such a thing as a "property node" that takes in an object and spits out a single property (height, width, position, color, etc.). Actually, I can use centroid to recover the position, but width, height, and color would be particularly useful. One general purpose solution would be to allow the lookup node to do this, using any property as a key value.
So my noob question is: "Is there already some way of doing this that I haven't figured out?"
And if not, that would be my next feature request.
Thanks!
John