Hello valiant Maya users,

I’m sorry to post about such a basic subject, but it’s been driving me mad and I can’t seem to find a solution, even after spending the day reading help files and forums.
So here’s my problem : is there a way for me to select the parent in hierarchy without highlighting all its children, or at least highlighting them with a different color?
As an animator I have to select multiple objects hundreds of times per day, and transitioning from Softimage and Max, I’m having quite a hard time with the display of selections in Maya. I get it that it can be useful to see the relations between objects when selecting, but because they all get highlighted with the “lead object” color, it’s just ridiculously confusing, as it looks exactly the same if I select just the parent or the whole hierarchy!

Thanks for your help!

I wouldn’t mind knowing a definitive answer to this also. I have looked extensively though the settings and preferences and found nothing of the kind.

as far as im aware its not possible with any nodes maya ships with. the highlighting comes with the parenting im afraid. a workaround i might use is a group on an object you would want parented then parent constrain it to the parent, then in pref turning sub-selection highlighting off.

if anyone has a better (and more informed) way of doing this, i would also too, love to hear it :)

Lee Dunham | Character TD
ldunham.blogspot.com

I guess this is just something I’ve gotten used to in my workflow - I ALWAYS leave my selection set to objects, so I always use the up-arrow to navigate to the top of a hierarchy, keeping an eye on the channel box to see the names of what I’m selecting. 

In your “Display” window under “Transform Display” there is a setting called “selection handles”. If you select a node in your hierarchy and choose that option, you’ll see a little “+” at the pivot of the object.  In component mode, you can select this little “+” and move it to wherever you like. 

Anytime you select this icon, that particular node in your hierarchy will be selected, regardless of what level it is on, or what selection mode your software is set to. 

It’s not the answer you are looking for, but it’s a workaround.  As I said, this lack of color-coding has been part of my workflow all along so I guess I don’t notice it.