Renaming objects in a group

[hatake-kakashi]

Hello,

I am trying to select every mesh in a group to rename them.
However when I try to loop over the selected group (don't even know if this is the correct way) it just prints out the name of the group. I can do the renaming but don't know how to loop over every mesh in a group.

Here is what I do:

 string $select[] = ls -sl;

 for($mesh in $select)
 { 
      print($mesh);
  }

Does someone have an idea?

[joojaa]

with mesh you mean shape nodes of type mesh or what normal people call the object namely the dag node just preceding that mesh. Now i guess the later since Maya does not have groups either, a group is just a empty transform. But the vocabulary people use when they call things groups grossly miscategorizes 5 different natural occurrences in Maya. So what you have is parent linkage and group, and object, but then your missing 2 other possible structures. So this makes it a bit overloaded request as i can satisfy your request in 10 different ways which all have really different outcomes.

If you use the standard Maya notational vocabulary and just consider all under the selection as part of the tree then its just simply. Note this is recursive so it will also name children and children children as well.

$selection =  `ls -sl`;
$allMeshShapes = `listRelatives -allDescendents -noIntermediate -type mesh $selection`;
$allMeshObjects = `listRelatives -parent $allMeshShapes`;

Stop at whatever definition of mesh that suits you, most users think the trasform is the mesh. If you dont want full recursive use list relatives  -children 2 times instead of -allDescendents in the first parent lookup.

Anyway this is sort of hard to define in code because i can not know what you mean by group mays structures do not have it defined in the sort of way thats meaningful*. Anyway this should sort you out whatever you mean by group.

*computers are very specific in meaning so I  have no other choice than to speak the same anal retentive language as the computer does. Does not mean i am. But just pointing out that the model computers use ad what you have in yoru head may not always match.

[hatake-kakashi]

Thank you very much for your informative reply!

With a group I meant for example: 5 cubes -> select all cubes -> press ctrl + g -> rename every mesh in that group to something.

This is what I came up with up that does the trick for me

string $nodes[] = ls -sl -dag;
int $i = 0;
for ($current_name in $nodes) {

rename -ignoreShape $current_name ("cube" + $i + $i++);

}

[joojaa]

Yes thats the menuitem thet makes things very confusing. Because theres really no way for a maya programmer to detect that something was created as a result ofr the edit -> group command after the fact as opposed to something else. Because a group looks jsut teh same as everything else.

And therefore thats the problem