17 April, 2009

"Easy Select" or "Proxy Select"

In the latest rigging project I have been working on this idea to make selection of controllers quick and easy. Generally the problem with curve controllers is that you cannot select them quickly because you have to be accurate in clicking the thin curves (unless you are an avid shooting game player and you have very high accuracy). In my experience sometimes it becomes a little annoying when it takes 3 clicks to select a controller.

So in this idea of "Easy Select" or "Proxy Select", I have hidden geometry that defines the selection area around a curve. Each controller has its own selection area defined this way. So instead of pin pointing on the curve you can click anywhere in this 3D area to select the curve controller. And a controller can have more than one objects defining its area, clicking on either of them will transfer selection to that controller.

I created a script to do this, so I click selection area geometry first and then select the target controller and click shelf button and I have "Easy Select" working for that controller. I also have an attribute on target controller so that I can turn this on and off. The big problem with this technique was that undo was creating this cycle where if I undo it goes back selecting proxy geometry and my scrip transfers that selection back to the control. And if I do undo again the same thing repeats. Hence I can't do any undo before "Easy Select" event. For the solution, I had to disable undo before I execute the function and turn it on at the end.

Different geo. that defines selection area for controllers.

I am still working on this script to make UI to list all "Easy Select" objects and their selection area objects. Also, I need to add a function to delete the nodes & attributes that I am creating so if you want to delete this feature from the scene you don't have to do it manually.

2 comments:

  1. hey cant we change the selection priority order in maya for this..

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hmmm you mean the nurbs control curves? I don't know of any such option.

    ReplyDelete