I think you've missed my point. Some of Maya's selection context is done in a normal or intuitive manner. Others are not. The point is that Maya's selection contexts are all over the place and the fact that some processes bear out multiple contexts only confuses matters. In the case of parenting, Maya gets the natural selection order right with the target being last. Its the majority of other processes that are unintuitive and inconsistent with this one.
I fail to understand how having to read the status line everytime i parent, constrain, or path animate something might be intuitive. I've been using using Maya since 98. I know where to get the status line information. I've written MEL scripts that post status line instructions. Thats not the point. The point is that the selection methodology in Maya is inconsistent, incongruent, and unintuitive. As if though each process was written by a different person at a different time and nobody knew what the other person was doing. This incongruency demonstrates that Maya completely ignores how and why we as users, as humans, think when it comes directionality of source -> target and how percieve this concept. This should be a simple intuitive process that the user can instantly extrapolate without having to read the manual every time you switch from parenting to constraints or animating. This is selection methodology. We do this one task, select items, hundreds of times a day. And Maya has no uniform selection paradigm. In fact Attach to Motion Path can even mislead the user into adopting bad behavior by allowing the user to think the selection order is one way until you go to motion path one curve on another and then it can be opposite the way someone has earned to attach objects to a curve. This is illogical. The original poster has a valid and salient point. And its not enough that all contexts are the same. They could all be the same and still be unintuitive because they could be contradictory to the way we think about selection naturally. Selection has to be designed to the way we as humans think and not just a procedure for the sake of being a procedure. Joey ________________________________________ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Luc-Eric Rousseau [luceri...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2015 5:13 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Maya thinks they're clever....and that's the problem On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES] <j.ponthi...@nasa.gov> wrote: > (as already noted by another poster) > > If you have two primitives selected, and attempt to parent constrain, the > second selected object will constrain to the first > > (as already noted by another poster) > > If you have two primitives selected, and attempt to parent, the first > selected object will become child of the second isn't this because you'd select all the children you want to parent, and then finish with the single parent, or select all the object you want to parent-constraint to, and then finish the single target? The "single" object is always last and highlighted in green vs other ones in white. btw, it's written on the help line at the bottom of the screen what you need to select to run the menu command: Parent: "Parent the selected object(s) to the last selected object" Contraint->Parent: "Select one or more target followed by the object to constrain"
