I am writing about a display issue in the Graph Editor in Maya in regards to a
character rig with many visibility toggles built in for easy animation usage. It's
based somewhat on the "Packageman" rig from Rigging101.com. I built this rig as
basically a puppet rig, so proxy meshes of the character are actually used for the
joints (the shape node of the mesh is simply parented under the transform node of
the joint - feels alot more like animating a puppet instead of grabbing tons of
NURBS curves or handles - Jason Schliefer used a similar method with Gollum I think).
There are various utility nodes used to hook up all the SDK's and visibilty switches.
What I am seeing though when opening the graph editor are several things that do not make sense...
Upon selecting any joint (the upper arm for example), the Graph Editor
automatically expands and selects the whole hierarchy from this joint and
under. You have to manually collapse it every time, and manually
reselect only the joint you want. Obviously a pain in the butt.
It also is showing every animCurve node that is used to actually
connect the Set Driven Keys for any joint or object: this means that
various visibility switches + SDK driven joints or other objects are all
showing these animCurve nodes in the Graph Editor, cluttering it
up...making animation much harder.
A little more background on the rig: if you
select the main root NURBS curve of rig (one of the few curves used),
this is also a visibilty control for the entire rig in addition to being the root control.
So there are various switches in the Channel Box for turning off/on different LOD's of
the rig, any body part you want, specific body part NURBS curve controls,
etc. Some of these are driven by simple Direct Connections made in the
Connection Editor or Hypershade. Others use various SDK's or animCurve
nodes to create the connection. I know it's a file issue specific to
the rig, as I compared mine to the Packageman rig, which is not having these Graph Editor display issues.
My guess is some small option that is not turned on/off, but nothing has worked so far. The Dope Sheet has a "Hierarchy Below" option under the "Show" menu, which essentially allows you to display/not display the hierarchy under your selected object - but the Graph Editor does not have this.
There is the Show menu in the Graph Editor that allows you to choose
which object types and attribute types you want to display. This same
Show menu (also in the Outliner) also has an "Auxilliary Nodes" option at
the bottom that supposedly allows you to add desired nodes to a "Hidden
in Editors" list. This so far also seems to have no effect.
Please help in any way possible. Thanks so much for your time.
John