Maya: Select border edges (like in 3dsMax)

I’ve set up hotkeys for selecting verts, edges and faces. However, I would really like a hotkey to select border edges the same way you do in 3dsMax. It doesn’t seem there is a selection tool in Maya that can do this on the fly, I always have to double-click an edge in edge-selection mode.

I basicly want to press the hotkey (which emulates a new selection mode), so whenever I drag-select over a mesh it will only select the border edges. If I were to select one edge that happens to be a border edge, it should select the entire loop.

So I was wondering, do anyone know if this is achievable in Maya? As you can direct hotkeys to run a script I’m guessing it could be possible, but the way I want this to work makes it challenging to create a script that does this for me.

You can use polySelectConstraint to do this. The code below sets this up for you with ALT+3 as the hotkey:

string $hotKey = `nameCommand -ann "Select border edges" -c "if (`polySelectConstraint -q -bo`) {polySelectConstraint -border false;} else {SelectEdgeMask; polySelectConstraint -border true;}"`;
hotkey -alt -k "3" -name $hotKey;

The only thing to keep in mind is to have polySelectConstraint -border false; in the hotkeys for vertex/edge/face-selection, so that it disables the selectionConstraint when you enter another selectionmode.

That didn’t work :confused: It looks like it works some times, but then I do some changes to the mesh and then it doesn’t work anymore

Yeah you’re right, it seems polySelectConstraint is based on the UVs of the mesh :|: The -texture flag doesn’t seem to do anything, however if you delete the UVs it works. I’m not sure if it’s possible to make this command work as if the mesh didn’t have UVs, none of the flags I tried worked though :sigh: