Duplicate Without Children

[christianmassyn]

Hi, I am working on a job involving a lot of animated background characters and I'm writing a script to connect bvh input to a character, that was made in setup machine, automatically. Got it working but now I need to be able to tweak the animation and i would like to still have the same control setup machine gave me. To do this I need to duplicate some manipulators and reconnect their attrs.

Problem now is that if I duplicate a manipulator I duplicate all its children too. Now the rest of my scripts does not work cause their are a lot of duplicated names in the scene. I dont want to change my script to know which (example) Righ_Arm_Manip I am talking about cause then I am still sitting with the unnesacary manips in the scene.

I tried to select -hi the duplicated manip and then deselect the manip I want to keep but it is still connected to some of its own children and cannot delete the children without deleting the manip I want to keep. It looks like i have to do a lot of unparenting before I can get my manip duplicated without its children.

Is their no way to make this work???

Any way, gonna just write a script to do this, but I can not belive that their is no default command for this, Thanks!

[molemansd7]

you can select the curve, duplicate everything, then select all the children and delete them...

so, dulicate the control, have it selected and try:

CODE
select listRelatives -c -type transform;
delete;

I couldn't find any tricky magic on duplicating directly without the children. The duplicate -po flag would only duplicate the transform and not the shape, which wouldn't help you out at all...

[christianmassyn]

Does not work at all and like I said, if I delete the children the origanal object is also deleted cause they r connected

[joojaa]

You could copy the transform first then copy the shape separately. OR! just copy the shape, and then conform the transform!

Please bear in mind, tough shape is the child of the trasform so acually making this copy is worught with HEAPS of problems mainly because maya does not think in theese terms. So its hard to say that copy but not childern if you still need to copy select children in all actuality making your jobs so much harder.

[christianmassyn]

Thanks Joojaa, I thought that the shape node child relationship is the problem, looks like something that will bother me a lot so might ass well try and make this my first plugin

[joojaa]

You will need to rethink your world view that's all. Its just a thing to avioid implementing things 2 times.

the main problem si that what artists call an object, and group is not clearly defined in maya.

heres a quickstart to get the thing going, still needs shader connections but.... Thats just replaicating the shading group connections. To copy the input history unconnect the chain at parent copy the chain connect the parrent connect the copy of chain to the shape instead

$parent=duplicate -parentOnly nurbsSphereShape1;
$shape=createNode -p $parent nurbsSurface;
connectAttr -f nurbsSphereShape1.worldSpace[0] ($shape +".create");
evalDeferred("disconnectAttr nurbsSphereShape1.worldSpace[0] "+$shape +".create");

[joojaa]

Came to think of it theres a better way.

Instance shape with parent command under copy of the duplicate -parentOnly transform. Duplicate that interfaced transform and delete the transform. This should save a LOT for time over deleting the child node graph especially if one wants to duplicate the input graph.

Also theres no much point in using api for this as its just too much work for to little speed advantage.