Writing a manipulator involves defining a subclass of the MPxManipContainer class, adding base manipulators to the container manipulator, and defining associations between the manipulator and the attributes on the nodes they affect. Even if your manipulator consists of only one base manipulator, it is necessary to create a container manipulator and add the base manipulator to it.

Container manipulators are composed of one or more base manipulators. When base manipulators are added to a container manipulator, they are referred to as children of the container manipulator, and are added using the createChildren method.

The association between the manipulator and the corresponding plugs on a node must be defined. The nature of the association between the manipulator and the plugs may be simple or complex. For simple associations, there is a direct correspondence between a manipulator value and the corresponding plug. For more complex associations, conversion functions are used. These are described below.