When you are setting up the disciplines for your flowcharts, you may find that you need to use a component that is unavailable to that discipline. For example, you may need a layout discipline to output information about shots, but this is not supported. But there is a way to combine different types of discipline - you can use a "parent" and "child".


In a parent and child relationship, you have your main discipline as the parent. Then you add a child discipline to the parent, as a kind of sub-discipline. This allows the parent discipline to use its own inputs and outputs and also those of the child. 


Diagram showing layout sequence as a parent, with layout shot as a child


We have included an example at the end of this article to show how the parent-child relationship works. 


To set a discipline to be a parent or child:


  1. Create the discipline that is going to be the parent. If you want to use a discipline that already exists as the parent, ignore this step.

    For more information, see Create a discipline and Change a discipline's properties

  2. Create the discipline that is going to be the child. If you want to use a discipline that already exists, select it so that you can edit its properties.

    When you create a discipline, you get a dialog for defining the discipline's properties.

    Create discipline dialog has a parent discipline field.
    When you select an existing discipline to edit it, its properties are shown in the sidebar.

    Sidebar shows discipline's properties, including the parent selection field
  3. Use the parent discipline setting to choose the parent discipline. When you choose the parent, SimpleCloud will create the parent-child relationship between the disciplines automatically.

    Use parent discipline field to select the parent
    Note that you can choose a child of another discipline to be the parent of the discipline you are editing. This creates a grandparent-parent-child relationship, where the grandparent can access the inputs and outputs of both the parent and the child. The parent can access the inputs and outputs of the child, but not the grandparent.

  4. Select Update.


On the Disciplines flowchart, the child discipline is added to the parent discipline. You can now add input and output connections as required (see Connect components on a discipline flowchart).


Example of discipline parent-child relationship


Let's say you have a layout department, and they work on the camera layout for a sequence. For this, you have a layout sequence discipline, and it has:


  • Layout assets as an input. These are all the assets (characters etc.,) that are needed for the entire sequence.
  • Scene snapshot as an output. 
  • A video of the sequence as an output. The director and layout supervisors can use this video to review the sequence.


After the layout work is done, the sequence is reviewed, altered if needed, and eventually is approved. At this point, the supervisors can decide how many shots are needed and add the shot information to the DAM.


The animation department need to work on each of the shots, and so they need the shot information and relevant assets from the layout department. The layout sequence cannot output information about shots itself, as sequences are not designed to output shot components. So the solution is to create a shot sub-discipline.


Layout sequence as parent with layout shot as child. 

With this setup, the layout sequence is the parent discipline. As the parent, it can use its own inputs and outputs and also those of any child disciplines. The shot discipline is set to be a child, which makes its inputs and outputs available to the parent discipline. 


The result is that the layout discipline can produce outputs for the sequence as a whole and also for the individual shots. The outputs for the individual shots are sent to the animation department, so they can work on them.