Long Hierarchy names for joints?

[explore]

On my skeleton, when i pick the joints in my hand
they appear as these ridiculously long names, that include every previous parents joint, organized with a "|" between them. For example:
I pick index1 in the outliner, and in the script editor it calls it:
Lhand_root|middle_palm|index1
I do not want this for a number of reasons. One reason is because when i go into the component editor, which I am going to be using to paint wieghts for my hand, it displays these super long names and allows me to see nothing in the spreadsheet. I've tried renaming these joints, but they just revert. I've also tried optimizing my scene file and I tried assigning "unique names" under preferences-->modeling

Thank you for any help.

[stebbing]

These long names usually occur when you have 2 skeleton hierarchies in you scene and the children in those skeletons have the same joint names as the children in the other hierarchy. It can even happen in different branches of the same skeleton. As an example you might have a joint named r_hand with a child called index_finger. If you also have a joint named l_hand and it has a child named index_finger Maya will call the joints r_hand|index_finger and l_hand|index_finger.
The best way to resolve this is to select the top most parent joint of the right hand and it's children and chose Modify>Prefix Hearty Names and give the parent joint and all of it's children a unique name prefix. You can use MEL's: select -hi to select all the children or choose 4.5's new menu item to do so prior to renaming them.
--Randy Stebbing

[jeffd]

It may not help you for painting weights, but when it comes to assigning weight the component editor sucks when you have a scene that causes long names to happen.

Try out the quickWeight script on this page...
http://www.austin3d.com/?section=downloads

It may be helpful.

--JeffD