Tip of the Week: Wildcards

Here's a tip that can be a major time saver.

You may already be familiar with the Input Box in Maya. It's a text field on the status line (on the top right of the screen) where you can type in the name of an object in order to select it. Type in "persp" and hit enter, and the perspective camera will be selected.

(Depending on which version of Maya you're using, the Input Box will look like either of the images below.)



A cool function of the Input Box is the ability to use wildcards (? and *) to select multiple objects at once. This makes it a very handy selection tool.

For instance, let's say you have several hundred objects in your scene that have "post" in their name (post1, post2, post3, postLeft, postRight, etc . . . ) and you want to select them all to apply the same shader to them. Simply type *post* into the Input Box, and Maya will select all the objects that have the word post in them.

The sky's the limit as far as potential uses. Basically, it's a great tool for tracking down objects that are scattered throughout your scene -- either for single nodes whose exact names you can't remember, or for multiple objects at once.

For more info on wildcards and the input box, I've posted a new tutorial on my website. You can check it out here: Wildcards.