Select every joint in a skeleton

[ID22OX22]

Hey everyone. I need a tip.

I make animations, and in doing so, I have to select every single joint in a skeleton.

The way I do it is reveal every joint in the outliner by clicking each subdivision. It's a very tedious process.

Is there any other way to do this?

Could I reveal every joint in the outliner without having to click every individual drop down somehow?

[sean.heasley]

Hi @ID22OX22

There's a few ways you can do this!

One way is to select All By Type > Joints from the Edit menu.

Another option would be to use these few lines of MEL:

{
string $selected[] = ls -type joint;
select -r $selected;
}

You could also set that mel to be a button you could then assign to a shelf or a hotkey!

Please let me know if this helps or if you need more assistance!

If one or more of these posts helped answer your question, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.

Kudos are greatly appreciated. Everyone likes a thumbs up!

[ID22OX22]

Well, there are multiple skeletons, and I only want to select all the joints of one of them.

Does that make sense?

[sean.heasley]

Hi @ID22OX22

Ah ok, what happens if you select the root joint of a skeleton in the Outliner?

Selecting the root highlights all the joints as well.

Aside from that you would probably need a custom script similar to the one above but instead works on specific skeletons.

[mspeer]

Hi!

Just use Shift Selection.

There are many options to filter what should be shown by using the Show menu.

[ID22OX22]

Well, I need to keyframe all the joints at once in a single skeleton. 

What do I need to do to select them all by using the root joint?

[sean.heasley]

Hi @ID22OX22

In that case, you could use auto key to get all of the joints.

So you would do show->joints, then click and drag all of them, then auto key and key the frames you need.

[ID22OX22]

Click and drag?

Sorry, but you lost me.

Is there any way you could show me instead of tell me?

[sean.heasley]

Hi @ID22OX22

By click and drag I mean just doing a standard marquee selection. You click and hold left mouse then drag and it will select whatever is inside the square.

[ID22OX22]

When I do that it just selects the root joint.

[mspeer]

Hi!

Sorry, this will not work by default only the topmost joint node in the hierarchy will be selected, the green highlight only shows children .

But why not using Outliner, it's a simple 3 click action.

- Filter joints

- Select topmost joint

- Shift select bottom joint

Ready to key.

[sean.heasley]

Hi @ID22OX22

Hmm ok.

I think @mspeer has the right idea. Can you try the steps he provided and see if that works for you?

[sean.heasley]

Hi @ID22OX22

Just wanted to check in to see how things were going. Any changes with this?

[ID22OX22]

Well yeah, but I have to unravel the subsections in the outliner.

Clicking on them one by one is a tedious process to shift select all the joints.

Is there any way around it?

[_sebastian_f]

for a case like this just select all the joints once and create a character set. that should give you what you want.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/downloads/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/Maya/files/G...

[mspeer]

Hi!

Shift-Click on the little cross icon in Outliner,

this reveals all children with one click

[Lindsey_Robbins · Accepted solution]

Select root joint, right click, select hierarchy is how I do it. Expanding all the nodes is tedious.

[mspeer]

Hi!

@Lindsey_Robbins.

Thanks, this is of course faster,

but it will select other objects too, if they are part of the hierarchy.

"Expanding all the nodes is tedious"

- It's only on single click (take about 1 ms) !?

[Lindsey_Robbins]

Oh, I guess it does select everything, not just the joints. Never thought about that, it's not like you want to set keys for non-joints. Man, I'm glad I'm not an animator. 😄

Yeah, shift_click will open all of them, but when you've got a rig that has nested groups (for set driven keys and stuff) and it fills your whole outliner up, it makes it more confusing for me to select that way.  I feel like your code snippet on a marking menu would work better.

[mspeer]

Hi!

As always it depends on the needs of a user and personal preferences which solution works best.

- Usually with a "clean" skeleton/herarchy i would prefer your mentioned solution (... > Select Hierarchy).

- For a more complex hierarchy in a certain case, filtering the View in Outliner and manual selecting the joints may be the fastest option.

- However if the user has very complex hierarchies very often and want to select only the joints, then of course a custom script is the best solution.