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Temporarily turning off custom pick-walking

Rigging General
#1

Hey everyone,

Simon and Will from Autodesk tweeted about how to temporarily turn custom pick-walking off. (The special hierarchy pick-walking from the controller tags that jumps between animation controls when you hit up, down, left and right.)

That pick-walking is very useful for animators, but it can be a pain for rigging when you want to select down into a shape node, or just move around the rig hierarchy, and not the animation hierarchy.

optionVar stores in your preferences, so it should only affect your computer, not any other animators. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong!)

import maya.cmds as cmds

# globally disable custom pickwalking
cmds.optionVar( iv=("ControllerPickWalking", 0))

# globally enable custom pickwalking
cmds.optionVar( iv=("ControllerPickWalking", 1))
6 Likes
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#2

thanx for sharing…
btw is this a 2019 feature? in 2018 it alway selects the shape when pressing down key…

#3

Hi Wilhelm,

No this is defined by the “controller” tags that get added when Shifter builds. That node was added around Maya 2016 or 2016.5 I think. It should still act the same in Maya 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 by default.

If it doesn’t happen in 2018 for you, try querying that optionVar, because it might already be set to 0 on your computer.

#4

Aaah this is so helpful! I usually select the shape when editing the curves to prevent children from becoming editable.

Thanks for sharing!