Layer editor and outliner

[kennyboy]

quick question;

I just read up on the layer editor, very similair to 3DMAX, so thats cool. My aim is to reduce the number of objects/groups in the outliner to make selecting easier. I tried to place objects into layers and hide/freeze them to try to remove them from the outliner but this doesnt work. Is there a way to actually reduce the number of objects in the outliner using layers?

[goggle]

No.

A layer is a set. The only way to reduce the overall number of things in the outliner is to delete said things. The entire purpose of the outliner is to show absolutely every node in your Maya scene.

You can group objects and give them a sensible heriarchy so that the outliner isn't as cluttered and individual objects are easier to find. Perhaps it will help to think of Maya as an operating system and the outliner as a DIR or LS, a list of all the existing objects.

The outliner also has a nice filtering tool. You can tell it to only show objects of specific types. Or tell it to only show objects who's names match a pattern you type in.

Of course, if you'd like, you can always create your own outliner in MEL that only displays objects in the selected layer. That actually sounds like a pretty good way to start learning MEL. Look into the command outliner and filterList.

So, I guess the answer is a qualified no. Hope this helps.
-James

[joojaa]

Not realy easily, outliner is designed to show you the entire hierarchy. Layars are primarily for vivibility/selectiontoggles

You can however prepend appaend a suffix to your objects and let the outline filter out what you dont need.

That said its possible to do a filter that shows you only a spesific layerset at a time, but youd need to use mel for this. but its easier to just setp a name based selection filtering if you arent fluent in mel.

Or you can add them to groups that are otherwise empty and collapse those groups.

[kennyboy]

Thats abit annoying

Thanks for ya replies. Sorry i took so long to reply, internet problem!

[joojaa]

heres a sample note that i had to include refresh because i dint have time to make a force refresh in the layer editor code (andf my force is a bit crude atough it works) feel free to edit to your needs.

global proc int isVisibleLayer( string $name ){
// First determine that the object is a legal layer member.
string $drawOvr = ($name + ".drawOverride");
if( ! objExists $drawOvr )
return 0;
string $connList[] = listConnections -t displayLayer -d false $drawOvr;
if( size($connList) == 1 )
return getAttr($connList[0]+".visibility");
return 0; // dont show items in default layer (change to 1 if you wish it to show them)
}

{
string $filter=itemFilter -bs isVisibleLayer;
string $window = window -w 100 -h 600;

   paneLayout -configuration "horizontal2" -ps 1 100 90;

string $editor1 = `outlinerEditor -f $filter`;


editor -edit -mainListConnection worldList -selectionConnection modelList $editor1;
setParent ..;
   button -label "Refresht" -c "$sel=`ls -sl`;spaceLocator;delete;select $sel;";


showWindow $window;

}