The Merged Network View

The Merged Network View shows the primary control attributes on the merged primary control after merging a network. Since Aria allows you to have multiple networks per file there might be cases where two or more networks have common shape targets that need to be dialed in synchronously. A good use case example is jawOpen. You might have one network for the face that has jawOpen and another network for the inner mouth geometry that also needs a jawOpen shape. Since the inner mouth network should have its jawOpen shape dialed in synchronously with the face's jawOpen merging their networks makes sense. When you merge them a new primary control node will be created that represents the merged network and will have a jawOpen attribute that when dialed will drive the jawOpen attribute of the face primary control and the jawOpen attribute on the inner mouth primary control.

In the image below the Merged Network View has two sliders one for "cheekSuck" and the other for "cheekPuff". In the Aria file we used we had two networks both with "cheekSuck" and "cheekPuff". So this view will only show data if the networks have been merged.

As mentioned above in our Aria file we had two different networks:

In our Aria file after the networks were build and merged we have three different primary control nodes in Maya - one for each network and one for the merged network.

And if you look at the attributes on the merged control you get all of the unique attributes per network and a single attribute for each common attribute per network. In our case both cheekSuck and cheekPuff are common across the networks.

Just like the Shape View if you dial in a slider for a Primary Node the value of the attribute on the Primary Control will be dialed in and then fed into the solver and blend shape node. So in the Merged Network View if you dial in "cheekSuck" in our example above using the slider then the "cheekSuck" attribute on the merged primary control node will be set and therefore the "cheekSuck" attribute on each network's primary control. This is how Aria syncs common primary attributes between networks. Aria makes these relationships bidirectional as well - which means if you set "cheekSuck" on an individual network that value will be propagated to the merged network primary control as well. And vice versa.