Selecting the parent of hierarchy without highlighting the children?

[ronberchin]

This seems like a very basic request but I can't seem to find the answer. I have a reasonably large hierarchy; I want to isolate the parent in the viewport without seeing the children. It seems that if I select the parent in object mode I also select the children, so I can't seem to use any isolation modes to hide the children...

[J450NP13]

Try double clicking the parent.

[ronberchin]

Thanks for the suggestion, but double clicking the parent doesn't work for me. Nothing happens when I double click the parent...just to be clear: I've selected the parent and then went to isolate (ctrl+1). This leaves only the parent and all the children in the viewport. If I then double click the parent, nothing happens. However - and I just thought to try this - if I click on the children and then "hide selection" the children are indeed hidden, leaving only the parent. But this seems like a work-around to me, although it does accomplish what I want.

Thanks

[J450NP13]

I know there is a way to do it...I just can't remeber off hand...Try selecting the parent then hit the up key.

[ronberchin]

There must be a way to do it...but...if I click on the parent in the viewport, it and all it's children are highlighted (in green)...there's a way to control what gets highlighted, in preferences and in the attributes panel for the transform node...but the children are still visible. If I hit the up arrow, nothing happens because I'm already at the parent; if I hit the down arrow, I lose highlighting on the children but they're still visible in the viewport; then use "hide unselected" to remove the children from the viewport. I guess that's how you do it...possibly a simple MEL script to do just what I said. 

Thanks again

[J450NP13]

I don't think you can isolate the children like that...unless you put them on a layer.

[ronberchin · Accepted solution]

The process I explained does indeed work: (1) select the parent (in the outliner, for example, and unless modified in the selection preferences and attributes for the transform nodes of the children, the parent and it's children will be highlighted in the viewport, (2) ctrl+1 will isolate the parent and the children in the viewport with all of them highlighed in the viewport, (3) now hit the down arrow and only the parent will be highlighted in the viewport, (4) "hide unselected" will indeed remove the children from the viewport, leaving only the parent. This is exactly what I want, just seems like a lot of steps to get there.

Your idea of using layers occurred to me, but that would involve haveing  to be setup a separate layer specifically for the children of each parent...

Still seems to me that there should be a way to do this with fewer steps than the method I stumbled upon using your idea of arrows to move down the hierarchy.