Disabling Selection Child Highlighting not working as intended?

[SpaceCoyote]

Hello. I'm going to be modelling some character which will have several objects parented to each other but I'd prefer not to see selection highlights for all the [numerous] children whenever I select the parent. After doing some searching, I've come across the Preferences>Selection settings for Child Highlighting as well as the object display attributes for Child Highlighting. But when trying all possible combinations of these settings, the only thing that changes is that when I select the parent the children are highlighted in yellow instead of the default green. And so the children are still always highlighted when the parent is selected. In the screenshot below, the parent is the left cube while the others are children.

yellow child highlighting

Is there something I'm missing? How can I select the parent without all the children being highlighted? I'm using the latest version of Maya 2020.

[SpaceCoyote]

Apparently there's supposed to be an option to disable Affected Highlighting in the Display preferences but I don't see that option. Weird...

[tdHendrix]

Setting Selection Child Highlighting to Never highlight works for me. Can you try to hit the 'b' key? I'm curious if soft selection is turned on.

[tdHendrix]

Just saw what you mean. When I tested it earlier I made a few cubes and parented them together, but that didn't highlight the cubes like in your screenshot. I just noticed it sometimes highlighting the hierarchy when selecting some controls on a rig.

[tdHendrix · Accepted solution]

Ok, I think I figured out what was causing it to highlight the children. It was because I had symmetry turned on. Try to go to the move tool settings and setting Symmetry to None.

With symmetry off and Selection Child Highlighting in the Selection preferences set to Never highlight it doesn't highlight the children for me anymore.

[SpaceCoyote]

Hah! Oh, symmetry! 😅 Thanks Greg - turning off symmetry made it so my childern were no longer highlighted. I've encounter some other quirks with symmetry before but I don't have a lot of rigging/parenting experience so I didn't think to experiment with this. Thanks again for your investigating! This will make things easier for me going forward.

[david_pinkney]

Been a while since this post but I had the same issue with a different resolution. For me the issue was that I had Soft Selection (b key) switched on whilst Selection Child Highlighting was switched off. For some reason in Object Select mode regardless of the brush size a parent selection will highlight all children yellow. Possibly a bug.

[dwilson6WCFQ]

I ran into this same issue/ question in 2024.2.  I only wanted to disable selection child highlighting for a specific object, so changing the universal preference to Never wasn't really going to do it for me.  The problem wasn't symmetry or soft select either

I realized that I was disabling Selection Child Highlighting on the Shape node.  It needed to be disabled on the Transform node.  e.g. Disable Selection Child Highlighting on pCube1, not on pCubeShape1. 

This makes more sense if you display Shapes in the Outliner: the object pCube2 would become a child of the Transform, pCube1, not a child of pCubeShape1, so of course pCubeShape1's Selection Child Highlighting setting will not affect the highlighting of its sibling, pCube2

Maybe I'm the only one who got stumped for this particular reason, but since this thread was the first result that came up, I want to add this just in case