Proper way to use setAttr with channel box selection

Question

please bear with me - I'm new to all this. I tried the searches and have only found bits and pieces to what I'm looking for, but not what I need to connect them.

Basically, I'm trying to create a Python script that allows the user to simply "0" out multiple selected attributes on Maya's Channel box.

So far I have:

import maya.cmds as cmds

selObjs = cmds.ls(sl=1)
selAttrs = cmds.channelBox("mainChannelBox", q=1, sma=1)

print selObjs # returns [u'pCube1']
print selAttrs # returns [u'ty']

If I would like to set the attributes:

cmds.setAttr(selObjs  + "." + selAttrs, '0')

of course this is wrong, so how do I properly execute the setAttr command in this sceneario? (The intention includes having to set them if I have multiple selected attributes in the channel box).

I found that in MEL, it works like this. So really I just need help figuring out how to create the python counterpart of this:

string $object[] = `ls -sl`;
string $attribute[] = `channelBox -q -sma mainChannelBox`;
for ($item in $object)
for($attr in $attribute)
setAttr ($item + "." + $attr) 0;

Moving after that, I need an if loop where, if the attribute selected is a scale attribute, the value should be 1 - but this is something I'll look into later, but wouldn't mind being advised on.

Thanks!

What happens if you use the code you say "is wrong"? Do you get an exception? The obvious thing I see is that you're trying to treat your one-item lists as if they were strings. You might want to try `cmds.setAttr(selObjs[0] + "." + selAttrs[0], '0')`, or just write `for` loops like you have in your MEL code. — Blckknght, Mar 04 '16 at 08:33
yes learned the hard way that what i was trying to do up there was to concatenate the lists (and not their contents) XD - learning pains — Gogo, Mar 05 '16 at 12:43

Gogo · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-05T16:35:06.597

So here's what I finally came up with:

import maya.cmds as cmds

selObjs = cmds.ls(sl=1)
selAttrs = cmds.channelBox("mainChannelBox", q=1, sma=1)
scales = ['sy','sx','sz','v']


if not selObjs:
    print "no object and attribute is selected!"
elif not selAttrs:
    print "no attribute is selected!"
else:
    for eachObj in selObjs:
        for eachAttr in selAttrs:
            if any(scaleVizItem in eachAttr for scaleVizItem in scales):
                cmds.setAttr (eachObj+"."+eachAttr, 1)
            else:
                cmds.setAttr (eachObj+"."+eachAttr, 0)

This will reset the basic transformations to their defaults. Including an if for the scale and visibility values.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 05 '16 at 11:37

I managed to come up with this:

import maya.cmds as cmds

selObjs = cmds.ls(sl=1)
selAttrs = cmds.channelBox("mainChannelBox", q=1, sma=1)

for each in selObjs:
       for eachAttr in selAttrs:
           cmds.setAttr (each+"."+eachAttr, 0)

And It's working to zero out selected attributes perfectly. Now im at the stage of figuring out how to get the script to recognize if it contains scale attributes - to change that value to 1 instead of 0. (stuck at how to extract values from a list at the moment)

Proper way to use setAttr with channel box selection

2 Answers2