[EMSUSD-669] USD Prims Selectability does not work properly and occurs bad behavior to AttributeEditor and ChannelBox

[stephanehoarau]

Bug Description
Hello!
We're experiencing a weird behavior with the USD Prim Selectability which seems like a bug to us.

Steps to reproduce

We have a scene with a usdProxy in it.
We'd like to turn off the Prim Selection of it using the optionVar 'mayaDisableUfeSelection'.
If we have the usdProxy selected and run cmds.optionVar(iv=('mayaDisableUfeSelection', 1)), the usdProxy will always remain selected.
We can get around that by clearing the selection and then toggling the optionVar.
The selection now behaves as we expect but now the Channel Box and Attribute Editor exhibit odd behavior:

• the Attribute Editor doesn't update properly with each new selection UNLESS we go back and forth with another panel to refresh the panel/dock UI (ex, selecting the channel box tab, then going back to attribute editor). then it will display the attributes of the currently selected object.

• the channel box panel always remains blank no matter what is selected

This appears to be the case for us when running in both Maya 2022 and 2023.

Any insight on this? We thought maybe this is some expected feature when working with UFE somehow, but the fact that the Attribute Editor refreshes when it gets toggles strongly suggests a bug to us.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Expected behavior
We would expect to not have the Attribute Editor nor the Channel Box unusable for other nodes than usd.

Specs (if applicable):

• Linux version 3.10.0-1160.92.1.el7.x86_64 (Red Hat 4.8.5-44)
• gcc version 4.8.5 20150623
• Maya 2023.3
• Maya USD 0.22.0
• Pixar USD 22.11

Additional context
(This has been already posted by another colleague few months ago)
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-forum/mayadisableufeselection-optionvar-breaks-channel-box-amp/td-p/12067372

Stephane
TD Lead @ Cinesite

[santosg87]

Thank you for reporting this. I am able to reproduce this issue internally as well. my apologies regarding the autodesk forum post, I don't think we had seen it prior to this.
I believe this is a Bug indeed, i am investigating further, but i couldn't find a workaround for it at this time.

I logged the issue internally as EMSUSD-669 and will discuss further with the team the viability of a possible fix.

this will very likely be something to be fixed within the Maya code itself, so a fix might not be noticeable on previous maya builds.

[stephanehoarau]

Thank you !
Hopefully we could get a fix for 2022 and 2023...

[seando-adsk]

@stephanehoarau Could you please give us more information about the issue you having and what problem you are trying to solve.

The optionVar mayaDisableUfeSelection is an internal one that is only meant to be used during our internal Maya performance testing to ensure that adding the Ufe selection is not impacting selection performance. It was never meant to be used as a way for a user to disable Ufe selection.

Sean

[stephanehoarau]

Hello !
Actually, the need for our animators is to disable specifically Usd Proxy selection. but this should not affect the Channel Box nor the Attribute Editor for other selection !
We would be happy to use the displayLayer or displayType reference mode on them, but this doesn't work correctly.

[santosd]

We added support for display Layers in Maya 2024 so reference mode with Display Layers should be a possibility in Maya 2024. @stephanehoarau is it possible for you to give that a try and see if that works for you?

[stephanehoarau]

Hello,
sorry for the long delay, but I still didn't try it in 2024 at work. We still need to adjust our environment to make it work.
Will post result when test will be done.