Maya "sets" names

Coding
1

Is this a known limitation? if so, why is there a naming conflict?

[ol]
[li]Create new scene[/li][li]Add a transform, name=‘zzz’[/li][li]Group it[/li][li]create a new set[/li][/ol]

So at this point the outliner should have


| group1
    | zzz
| set1

Now try renaming the set to ‘zzz’. It will rename it to ‘zzz1’ instead. How is there a naming conflict?

2

I can only assume that because Sets are a special Class (along with Partitions) they need to be completely unique from anything in the scene. Bugger Hey!

3

Same is true for File Nodes, Materials, Shading Groups… you can’t have a Lambert with the same name as a Transform. Two transforms can have they same name because they can be guaranteed to have different parents… not true for Sets, Materials, File Nodes, etc.,

4

Yup DG node names must be unique as they don’t have any DAG path. A set (objectSet) is a DG node even though it appears in the outliner (even when you have “DAG objects only” checked :P).

5

i get that a dg node would need a unique name within the realm of other dg nodes, but a transform is a dag and isn’t the name the full dag path? in my example, shouldn’t the node name be |group1|zzz and the dg node should be able to be named zzz?

6

As far as I understand it a DG node’s name has to be unique with respect to Dag node’s short names. As another example of this you wouldn’t be able to name a display layer ‘zzz’ in that scene either. I don’t know the internal reasoning behind that but as far as I can remember it has always worked like that.

At a guess it may just be handled like that for simplicity’s sake. Say if you set up the scene as you first described and it allows you to name the set ‘zzz’. Then if you move the transform ‘zzz’ out of its hierarchy into the scene root it would have to get renamed to make it unique again even though there are no other objects with that name in the 3d scene? Doesn’t sound like a show-stopper but it could be confusing.

Whether the current method is any less confusing is a matter of opinion though I suppose :P.

7

thanks for the explanation, it was a curious behavior