Wildcard Selection and Referencing in Maya

StephenWongTA

My team is having problems using referenced files and the "select by name" tool within Maya. Whenever we use a reference and try to use a wildcard selection in the "select by name" tool, we get an error saying that no items match. However, when we go back to the original file, we are able to use the wildcard selection in the tool. Anyone have any work around fixes for this?

DireWolf

Not sure if you can use the tools for this, but using MEL/Python you could do it 2 ways. Add : to your search string, or use recursive flag.

example in MEL
ls "*:item_name"
ls -r 1 "item_name"

StephenWongTA

The only problem I can foresee is that I end my controls with "_cnt". Is there a way to include the ":" and "_cnt" ?

haiddasalami

Just do *:itemName_cnt or am I missing something? You can also go down the regex/string manipulation path if extra functionality is needed.

StephenWongTA

I was told that you can use multiple wildcards and it worked.

I ended up using "*:*cnt*" and that did the trick!