Issue with inability to select object after duplication Maya 2020

[tazmanian666]

<Maya 2020 Windows 10>

Hiya

I'm doing the scifi ship tutorial by Stephen Wells on 3dMotive.

I'm on the cockpit section which is basically Volume 1 at the start around 3 videos in.

I built up the cockpit shape (pPlane4) and as directed in the tutorial, duplicated the shell using CTRL + D.

This wasn't a -1 negative scale copy across the Y axis, just a straight duplication. Tutorial then mentions renaming renaming 'pPlane4' to 'hull' and then hiding it. The remaining copy (pPlane5) is unselectable for me. I can select it in the outliner and after that can change to object, face, edge or vertex mode but still cant select anything. So basically cannot select it with the mouse nor can i select it via 'drawing' a selection box around it. It can only be selected via outliner. If i unhide the original (called 'hull'), that one is fine and can be selected with the left mouse button. it's very strange. This is not an 'instance' of the original nor did i use duplicate special, just a simple CTRL + D duplicate.

Ive reset the tools, I've deleted prefs, reloaded the scene file, deleted history etc (although might still be an issue with these in my frustration)

In the earlier iteration of the shape, it's seems okay so what have I done to disable this selection function at this stage ?  Soft selection isn't ticked either. When i put a selection box around both objects, only the original will then be selected. I'm not accidently selecting the image planes either as they are locked. Very strange and frustrating as most answers can be found by googling etc but this one escapes me and my search efforts.

[tazmanian666 · Accepted solution]

I evntually found out the reason although I have no idea how it happened.

I was comparing the properties of both cockpit shapes in the Attribute editor (pPlane4 and pPlane5), repeatedly selecting one then the other, to see if there was any diifferences between them. I noticed that pPlane5 had an additional tab that the other didn't. It had an 'image_planes' tab and on that tab, it was set to reference only. Setting it to 'normal' sorted the issue. Also there was no reason why this cockpit shape would have been in the layers editor, otherwise I might have spotted the 'reference' only attribute

Why ? I have no idea but presumably something I did during the tutorial. I dont know how to remove that tab...deleting history makes no differnece. Anyway I'm glad it sorted

[tazmanian666 · Accepted solution]

Edited the objects attributes in Hypergraph and now the 'Imageplane' tab/reference has been deleted

[lynn_zhang]

Hello @tazmanian666, thanks for posting!

Glad to hear you fixed the problem yourself and thanks so much for sharing the solution! This will benefit other users in the community with the same issue.