Silly Question: Selecting Hierarchy "leaves"

[getting-tired]

Hello. This is something that has been annoying me intensely: how to select a 'leaf' of a hierarchy without selecting all its 'children'.

The 'leaf' selection button just lets me select the leaf and everything below it, and the 'hierarchy' selection selects the whole hierarchy. If I have, for example, a car built with the wheels as children of the car body, and tyres as children of the wheels, how do I apply a material to the wheel without the tyre 'inheriting' it? (Or do I need to un-parent it then re-parent it? That seems very messy!) There MUST be something I'm missing here!

Hoping for a simple answer very soon! By the way, I'm using a rather ancient Maya 6.5!

Thanks!
- Pete

[gmask]

it's kind of a bad habit to parent objects to other objects transform nodes.. they should be grouped

[joojaa]

QUOTE(getting tir @ 04/21/09, 04:07 AM) [snapback]306339[/snapback]
There MUST be something I'm missing here!

No you are notm as far as mayas concerned all children are equal, your not actually selecting any of the shapes at all so what gets highlighted IS NOT what you selected. You selected the transform and thus all functions assume you want to operate on the immediate child.

This is the most significant clue that maya really has no concept of a 3d object just trasnsforms and shapes. So you have just got a concept in your head maya does not have, eliminate thet concepot form your head and you notice it doenst matter one way or another.

QUOTE
how do I apply a material to the wheel without the tyre 'inheriting' it?

it should only color the thing in the immediate children of the election even if it highlights mroe than you think it ought to.

[getting-tired]

QUOTE(Joojaa @ 04/21/09, 08:16 AM) [snapback]306373[/snapback]
it should only color the thing in the immediate children of the election even if it highlights mroe than you think it ought to.

Nope, I'm afraid either my Maya is misbehaving, I am doing something wrong, or I've misunderstood you...
I've tried a very simple test...
Create 3 objects (say, sphere, cube, cylinder).
Parent them:

.....sphere
........|___cube
...........|___cylinder

Select the cylinder and apply a new material to it. Let's call it GREEN.
Select the cube and apply a new material to it. Let's call it RED.
oops....the cylinder is now RED too. Not what we wanted. Oh well, at least it's the last object in the hierarchy so we CAN actually select it on its own and fix it. Bit of a waste of time.
Select the sphere and apply a new BLUE material. AAAAAAARRRGHHH!!!!! EVERYTHING'S GONE BLUE! Oh well, let's try to give a new material to just the cube.....no...JUST the cube...no, Maya, naughty Maya...NO! I just want to select the CUBE!!! STOP IT! Just the CUBE! NO! BAD MAYA! ON YOUR BED!

As you can probably tell, this is driving me slightly insane. There MUST be a way to just select ONLY the cube from the hierarchy!?!

By the way, I'm not sure I fully understand gmask's comment about it being a bad habit to parent to transform nodes - I'm modelling a complex robot arm (no skeleton, no IK, no skinning, just parented objects) and have the hierarchy set up something like:

.....base
........|___shoulder
...........|___elbow
..............|___forearm
.................|___wrist
....................|___pincers

....you get the idea. But I've got some materials applied to the forearm, wrist and pincers, but haven't yet applied a material to the shoulder. If I apply one, it overrides all the lovely materials on everything below in the hierarchy. There MUST be a simple way around this without having to unparent everything (and probably screw up my animations and expressions).

Is the only way around this to be absolutely sure to apply a different material to every object before parenting them? Even then, what if I've created a load of different materials for each object in the hierarchy, then someone comes along and says "hey, I've got a great new material that would be perfect for that forearm object!" I could load the material, then how would I apply it to JUST the forearm? I suppose I could delve into the hypershade and edit the connections to the shadinggroup node for the existing forearm material and link them to the new material or something......as I said, there must be a simple way!

By the way, thanks for your very quick responses and help!

[joojaa]

Not necessarily.

QUOTE
Select the cylinder and apply a new material to it.

What of the 6 methotds to set materials do you use. Each of them has a slighlty different methodology to define scope maily because it would be a bit stupid to have many exactly similliar method!

I mean if you rmb set material then yes that would apply to entire hiearachy it is after all a quick togle for the object in question. As far as mayas concerned a object is all above.

But yes you hierarchy is not actually:

.....sphere
........|___cube
...........|___cylinder

it is actually:

.....sphere
........|___sphereShape
........|___cube
...........|___cubeShape
...........|___cylinder
................|___cylinderShape

You just have the display shapes option in outliner off. You can also select invividual shapes directly by hitting arrow down. Its just that you can not trasform indivisual shapes and the trasform is considered the actual basis of a object thus maya never intentionally select just shapes.

As you can see sphereShape and cube has same relationship so how to decide wich one is more important?

Personally i can not for earth of me understand how it helps people to hide vital information at start and than let advanced users show it. It would make SO much more sense if advanced users were to hide them instead. I mean it applies to all applications and programs ive encountered, on can not truly understand how it works untill one switches off all lets hide thsi form user options, so their only purpose is to confuse users.

[getting-tired]

Thank you SOOO MUCH, Joojaa! Yep - show shapes in outliner, select the SHAPE node, Hypershade > Assign Material to Selection...JOB DONE!

Yes, how incredibly silly not to have the shapes nodes displayed by default, when they're such an important aspect of understanding how the node hierarchy actually works (which you've very helpfully explained).

Again thank you so much! Case closed, me=happy punter , Joojaa=genius (who's generous enough to spend time helping others)!

[joojaa]

QUOTE(getting tir @ 04/21/09, 04:08 PM) [snapback]306395[/snapback]
Yes, how incredibly silly not to have the shapes nodes displayed by default, when they're such an important aspect of understanding how the node hierarchy actually works (which you've very helpfully explained).

Well i think is one of those, loose loose situations. Its going to confuse users anyway. Its a bit like the not showing of file extensions in windows, it is sort of extra information.

Its the kind of stuff one could conceivably live without for most day to day operation if you have a very good inhouse support team. Both of theese exemplify the same thing well, since neither of these would be of any interest to user who works in well planned multi user environment where the tech staff can take care of this. I mean it doent really matter if you can see the windows file extension or not provided the sysadmins would set all your file associations right and the most complex application you use is word, no malware would exist etc. Likewise this info in maya wouldn't be all that importent to a normal user assuming youd be working witha afew shading and rigging TD's. Especially if its intended you focus on one thing and nevre progress (belive it or not when businesses say they want you to develop, 50% of them dont mean it because your better workforce not knowing better)

The big problem is that we use these same things in organizations where we ourselves are doing the most of all then suddenly there are options start to matter MUCH.

So the rationale is make things as simple as possible, hide all that may be even remotely extra. So the underlying idea is less is simpler. Except that's not true. I mean im curretly trying to sort out a problem like this.

Im spending 4 hours making a color slider that takes 1 value to make the color lighter/brighter because its supposed to go to users who shouldnt care of things. I cant for earh of me undertand why rgb or hsv color is so hard concept (to 50 year old user with a minimal computer experience for example) but still thst what i was told to do. I suspect nobody uses the simplified slider version, but the hardest part is that I have to decide for them what is the best metric to make a color brighter. Theres all sorts of questions regarding this that make it stupidifyingly insane task to do. How on earth will i know what users precieve as a a better color to suit the need. So what i do instead is fudge something that MIGHT work. None of this actually solves any of the underlying problem that at the end of the day a user needs to know what it is they are doing. But still thats the design goal number 1 and thats what they shall get, even if i dont wouch for it.

A lot of this kind of requirement blabla is written to developers all around the world all the time. It looks good on paper and in genral means nothing beneficial for anybody except the bosses. Quite often ease of use is a just a illusion stemming form limitation, and the fact that IF its hard then your putting people in a inequal position. People hate inequality in western world so its better to give out crap than something perfect that would be even better when somebody fabulously good can get their hands on it.

[gmask]

QUOTE(getting tir @ 04/21/09, 02:37 AM) [snapback]306384[/snapback]
By the way, I'm not sure I fully understand gmask's comment about it being a bad habit to parent to transform nodes - I'm modelling a complex robot arm (no skeleton, no IK, no skinning, just parented objects) and have the hierarchy set up something like:

.....base
........|___shoulder
...........|___elbow
..............|___forearm
.................|___wrist
....................|___pincers

Well for example in actual production work nobody would create a character in this way, they'd use a skeleton. There's alot to be gained by doing so.

[getting-tired]

Yes, I agree...sometimes having ALL the information can make life much simpler. Take (please, take it! Get rid of it!) Microsoft Word. Normally, it only displays about half the items in each menu and you have to do another click to find the rest of them (I've no idea if they've dropped this stupid "feature" - I use OpenOffice). Then Adobe, purveyors of very fine software, decided to get in on the act with InDesign. By default, it only shows about half the menu options, and the poor user is left floundering in the dark when the manual says to select something from the Edit menu only to find it's not there unless you go through some silly palava. And it's not as if InDesign is aimed at novice users! Nor is Maya, come to that! I can fully understand having the option to turn off settings (lock & hide selected attributes in Maya is great) but they should surely all be ON by default.

gmask:
I decided not to use a skeleton just to "see if I could". I also wanted to play with lots of expressions linking different components (eg. pistons, levers [- which incidentally do use skeletons] etc.). Not that this precludes the use of a skeleton of course. I also didn't want to use any IK because the robot moves in an illogical, over-the-top way, not an IK kind of shortest-route-direct way. Although, yes, I could still use a skeleton without IK and probably should do. But it all works OK for now and I've set up a nice load of set driven key attributes.....AH YES...on the subject of set driven key attributes (maybe I should start a new thread for this) is it possible to 'copy & paste' attributes from one object to another? For example....

Say, I've set up my robot arm with a nice control object with a bunch of added attributes to control pitch, roll, grip, extension for the arm, all linked with expressions or set driven keys to the appropriate bits.

Imagine that I've also built a car with a control object for, say, direction and speed.

Is it possible to create a new control object and move ALL the attributes onto it, to keep all these controls in one place? I've nosed through the hypergraph, looking to reconnect the attributes, but the expressions and set driven keys create a LOT of connections.

Wow...it's amazing how much I can type when waiting for a render with CHROMATIC ABERRATION to finish!

[gmask]

QUOTE(getting tir @ 04/21/09, 08:51 AM) [snapback]306433[/snapback]
Is it possible to create a new control object and move ALL the attributes onto it, to keep all these controls in one place?

It's possible but I don't think there's a built in procedure for doing it but one could be written..

essentially you'd add the same attributes to the controller and then reconnect the attributes to the new controller and then delete the old attributes.

[joojaa]

QUOTE
I've no idea if they've dropped this stupid "feature"

No they dorpped the entire notion fo menus and showing users anything. Cant for earth of me not understand what one would want to use a word processor for tough

QUOTE
It's possible but I don't think there's a built in procedure for doing it but one could be written..

isnt that basically what a character set does?

[gmask]

QUOTE(Joojaa @ 04/21/09, 09:49 AM) [snapback]306442[/snapback]
No they dorpped the entire notion fo menus and showing users anything. Cant for earth of me not understand what one would want to use a word processor for tough
isnt that basically what a character set does?

Well it doesn't move anything but creates a "master controller" with links to the attributes you want.. as far as moving custom attributes from node to another....