Visibility Controllers

With all these icons lying around, your Maya scene can become messy and difficult to navigate. The final tool we will use in this chapter is a visibility control, which lets us show or hide the various icons. For the animator, it’s an easy way to identify what icons are needed and hide the ones not being used.

Before we implement the visibility control, we first need to take a broad look at our scene. Load the Kila_XtrasRig.mb file you have been working on so far, and open up the Outliner. As you can see in Figure 12.73, left, we have lots of new objects that are forming the rig. Let’s compile them all into a nice neat group.

Select everything except the main LOD group (KilaLOD), the main scene cameras, and the RootControl group. We omit this last element because it contains the main skeleton. For now, all we want are parts of the rig. So group everything you have selected into a new group, Kila_Controls (Figure 12.73, middle). Also, rename the RootControl group so that you have a better idea of what it is; call it Kila_Skeleton.