Displaying Options in the Outliner

There are several options in the Outliner for displaying nodes and their hierarchical arrangements. You can see that the default perspective, top, side, and front cameras are visible as nodes at the top of the Outliner. Also, there are a number of sets such as the defaultLightSet that appear at the bottom of the Outliner. These sets are mainly used for organization of data by Maya and are usually not directly edited or altered.

• 1.  In the Display menu of the Outliner, select the Shapes option to display the shape nodes of the objects. The shape nodes appear parented to their respective transform node. You can select either the transform node or the shape node in the Outliner to select the object.

accessing Outliner Options
You can right-click in the Outliner to quickly access the Outliner’s display options rather than use the menu at the top of the Outliner.

• 2.  In the Display menu, activate the visibility of attributes by selecting the Attributes (Channels) option. Each node now has an expandable list of attributes. Most of the time you may want this option off because it clutters the Outliner and there are other ways to get to these attributes. Ultimately, how you use these options is up to you.

• 3.  Turn off the Attributes display, and turn off the DAG Objects Only option. This allows you to see all the nodes in the scene in the Outliner list as opposed to just the DAG nodes.

DAG stands for “Directed Acyclic Graph,” and DAG objects are those objects that have both a shape and a transform node. It’s not really crucial to understand exactly what Directed Acyclic Graph means as long as you understand that it is an arrangement in which a shape node is parented to a transform node. When you turn off DAG Objects Only in the Outliner, you’ll see all the nodes in the Maya scene appear. Many of these are default utility nodes required to make Maya function, such as the renderLayerManager node or the dynController1 node. 

Many other nodes appear when you create a new node or connection. An example of this would be a keyframe or an expression node.When you turn off DAG Objects Only, the list can get quite long. To fnd a node quickly, you can type the node’s name in the feld at the very top of the Outliner. This hides all nodes except the named node. Clearing the feld restores the visibility of all nodes in the Outliner (see
Figure 1.13).

 

Figure 1.13
The Outliner can display shape nodes as well as other types of nodes in the scene.

next The Channel Box - Maya Autodesk

By Eric Keller with Todd Palamar and Anthony Honn

Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana