Select selection set with hotkey

[mans.larsson79PXK]

Hi!
I'm pretty new to rigging and animation in 3ds Max, but have done it for many years previously in Maya. In Maya I had a script that really speeded up the process of selecting controls when animating characters.

The script basically lets you select all the members in the selection set your currently selected object belongs to. If the wrist was selected, I would press a hotkey and the whole arm became selected. Is there anything similar to this in Max, or a handy script for this?

Thanks!

[10DSpace · Accepted solution]

@mans.larsson79PXK 

For my morning script challenge, I put together the attached script which will do what you ask.  It parses all of the selection sets in the scene to see which selection set the currently selected object is in and then selects that selection set.  So I assume in your use case you do not have your wrist (in your example)  belonging to more than one selection set.  The script will not be able to distinguish between 2 selection sets containing the same object; the last selection containing the object would be selected by the script in the case of multiple selection sets with the same object in them.

But from your description, you probably have each object only belonging to a single selection set.   Unzip the attached and then drag the file SelectSelectionSetbyMember.mcr into a max viewport to install it.  Once it is installed it will appear in the list of actions you can hot key via Customize menu.   Hope it helps.  I took the time because I thought it would also be helpful to me, so thanks for your post. 

[mans.larsson79PXK]

Wow, thank you so much, it works great!
I realized how much my workflow was centered around this function once I had to work without it.. but not anymore! 😁

You should add this to scriptspot, there are probably more people out there who would really benefit from this!

Thanks again!

[domo.spaji]

There are tools for moving up/down hierarchy, hierarchy based selecting and similar...

I 'm trying to figure out how your method working, but really can't...

So:

"If the wrist was selected, You would press a hotkey and the whole arm became selected."

Now what?

[mans.larsson79PXK]

If you have a suggestion for a similar script I would love to hear it! I'm still kind of new to this aspect of 3ds Max.

In the case of this kind of script in the context of character animation I would say a good use is to group controls that are often animated together in selection sets, then they are quick to select without altering the hierarchy.
Right now I'm animating a bee, and very often I quickly want to select 4 of the 5 wing controls to animate the flapping of the wing, often after adjusting just one of them, so not the whole hierarchy.
Also, for example, the 6 legs have individual up vector nodes, sometimes I need to move just one or two to correct the pose, sometimes it's really nice to just select them all quickly and adjust their placement.

Also it's a nice and quick way of selecting different groups of objects when just creating a scene in general.

As I said, I would love to hear about more scripts making the selection of groups/hierarchies of objects easier and more intuitive 🙂

[domo.spaji]

Select Similar - Ctrl+Q

 Select Child - Page Down

Select Ancestor - Page Up

Select By Layer
Select By Color

[domo.spaji]

About "Select Similar"...

Say you have bone obj.

Assign some "turn to" mesh, poly, patch modifier to it/them and toggling modifiers on/off you make it part of different group... That's 4 different groups...

+ Layer dependant

Assigning different materials there's countless "Subgroup options"...

Eg. All poly obj. on same layer with same mat. (or no mat.) are "Similar"

[mans.larsson79PXK]

Thank you, selecting by color could be a good complement to this! (since it seems you can't do nested selection sets in Max)

The others sure have their uses, but not in the way I was looking for here.

Also I have found select sibling is a good way of jumping from one side of the rig to the other (when working with symmetrical rigs).