MEL - Select Geometry ONLY within a selection

[Anonymous]

Hi Everyone,

I'm having trouble writing a MEL script that only selects geometry within a selection. For example: I have a hierarchy with groups, geometry, locators, 3d nodes, distanceDimensions, etc. I want it to select only the geometry within that selected hierarchy and nothing else, otherwise the script will error and won't continue on to the next portion.  

Here's what I have so far:

// primary visibility TEST
string $selection[] = `ls -sl -s -dag`;
for ($node in $selection)
{
editRenderLayerGlobals -currentRenderLayer TEST;
setAttr ( $node + ".primaryVisibility") 0;
}

If I use 'ls -geometry'; it selects all the geometry in the scene, but I only want it to affect what is inside my selected hierarchy. 

Thanks in advance,

[Anonymous]

The command you want is the listRelatives command.

[Anonymous]

Rallion, thanks for responding. I tried listRelatives briefly but it wasn't working. Once I have more free time I'll try it again. 

[Anonymous]

Not sure with mel, but you could use list comprehension in Python.

Create 2 lists:

1)Selected Objects.

2)Geometry in the scene.

3)Combine the two if the match. 

import pymel.core as pm

sel = pm.ls(sl=True)
meshes = pm.listTransforms(type='mesh')
selectedMeshes = [x for x in sel if x in meshes]

[Anonymous]

Hey there,

did you ever manage to create something that worked?  This is such a simple concept, I'm surprised I couldn't find this anywhere else on Google, for all specified type objects within hierarchies.

[Anonymous]

Yes I resolved it with the filterExpand command: https://help.autodesk.com/cloudhelp/2017/CHS/Maya-Tech-Docs/Commands/filterExpand.html

MEL Example:

string $selection[] = `ls -sl`;
string $polyGons[] = `filterExpand -sm 12 $selection`;
select -r $polyGons;

You can also do the same thing via Python:

selection = cmds.ls(sl = True)
polyGons = cmds.filterExpand(selection, sm = 12)
cmds.select(polyGons, r = True)

Hope it helps.

[Anonymous]

Awesome I will try them out.

A coworker also quickly cooked up this python script and it seemed to work fine:

import maya.cmds as mc
mc.select(hi=True, r=True)
hierarchy = mc.ls(sl=True, long=True)
shapes =  filter(lambda x: mc.nodeType(x) == 'mesh', hierarchy)
transforms = [mc.listRelatives(shape, p=True, fullPath=True)[0] for shape in shapes]
mc.select(transforms, r=True) 

I believe the script pasted correctly.  Ot gave me an error when I tried to post about invalid html.