Hiding a joint without hiding its children in Maya?

Hello again!

This may seem like a silly question, but in Maya if we have a chain of joints (parent and however many children), as soon as you hide the parent joint (set its visibility attribute to 0), then all the children become hidden too. :rolleyes:

I can’t believe that there isn’t a way to hide a single joint at the top of a hierarchy without hiding all the others, so am I missing something?

I’ve looked through pretty much every settings menu in Maya and also the Help and Command reference, without turning up anything useful on this.

Along the same lines, when you have a parent joint and child joints, if you delete the parent, then you automatically delete all the children too! That’s pretty nasty behaviour, and I’ve noticed it does the same no matter what sort of object you have (pCube parented to pCylinder - delete the cylinder and you’ve lost the cube too). Any way to stop this without making a custom “delete” command which checks for children and keeps them when the parent is deleted?

And a final thing in the same vein - is there any way to turn off selection highlighting for child objects if the parent is selected? Every time I grab a parent joint, then entire chain becomes highlighted in green, making it very hard to tell what my actual selection is. Surely there must be a way of disabling this?

Myself and other people here find these default Maya behaviours very annoying and actually slow down work instead of speeding it up. Please tell me that we’ve just somehow overlooked a magical setting in the preferences? :curses:

hi MoP,

regarding the hiding of joints (its dirty but sure is a way to do it !)

say you have joint1 > joint2 > joint3 > pCube1 and if you want to hide only the joint2… select joint2, go to its AE, enable the drawing overrides, and choose “bounding box” in the level of detail… and on joint3, enable overrides and leave all the default settings…

you should have the joint2 hidden and its children visible as they were…:nod:

and i think a custom “delete” command is required to keep the children… !:scared:!