New Selection Highlighting project

[GennadiyKorol]

I don't believe a plug-in could be of any help here. This is something that's hardcoded in Maya. Maya owns the selection list, it owns the scene, it draws it the way it likes when it likes, you can't really override any drawing behavior for wires.

But maybe writing your custom OpenGL viewport may give you that control, maybe that's the direction you might want to check out.

Hope it is of help,
Cheers

[Andrei2k]

Highlighting is very useful for rigging if nothing else. I do hear you on seperating hierarchical selections however. You can maybe choose to display a numbering system of selection or coloring system sort of like changing the colors in the preferences on the "selected object" vs. "Lead Object" and how they are set to different colors by default.

[Skyer]

Highlighting is very useful for rigging if nothing else. I do hear you on seperating hierarchical selections however. You can maybe choose to display a numbering system of selection or coloring system sort of like changing the colors in the preferences on the "selected object" vs. "Lead Object" and how they are set to different colors by default.

naaah, I think two separate highlight modes would be the best choice, look at XSI so you can see what I mean, if you just left click, just the parent gets highlighted. if you middle click however, the entire hierarchy gets highlighted (ala maya)
in Max, if you left click, just the parent gets highlighted, if you double click, then you select the entire hierarchy, which is cool, but not the same as just highlighting.
trust me, I like Maya, but I do believe somethings would make it better, like this. just like breakdown keys would make XSI better. :)

[Andrei2k]

I am not dissagreeing with you I am just stating how visually selections could also be improved. I understand the functionality aspect and also think that would be great. The thing with Maya also is that if you select a parent and hit delete it will delete the entire hierarchy. It would be awesome if with your selection method you can optionally delete or run commands on a top node and not affect the nodes below, much in the same way you would seperate selection. THAT would be extremely useful as well.

[GiantG]

Hi..

Here's a very simple script that maybe do what you want.

proc HighliteSelectedOnly ()
{
string $SelObj[] = `ls -sl`;
string $ShapeOfSel[] = `listRelatives -c -s`;
select $ShapeOfSel[0];
}
scriptJob -event "SelectionChanged" "HighliteSelectedOnly";


for multi selection adjust the script...

This Script converts your Selected Transform to his Shape. When the Shape is selected Maya doesn't highlite the children.
After all a made a sciptjob which do this automatically when you select any Transform.

[DrYo]

Although this doesn't teach you anything about scripting, there is another solution: don't use parent-child links at all. Use Parent Constraints instead.

(I agree that Maya's interface is very non-intuitive in this regard.)

[Andrei2k]

Hah very true. I hardly ever use traditional hierarchies myself, since I have been rigging for a long time but I was just trying to point out usefulness of the concept or purpose of what Skyer was originaly thinking. In order to move the idea a step further it would be nice to color code classifications between constraing in the viewport. I usually rely on hypergraph for that but it would be nice to have a visually customizable dag node connection system of displaying dependancies.

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