What The…?

Like many Maya heads I have long wrestled with the problem of filtering lists to get what I’m interested in. You’re probably familiar with the use of the type flag in cmds.ls() to filter on types: for example this will give you only the transforms in your current selection:

cmds.ls(sl=True, type = 'transform')

This works for any node type (the list is quite long: it’s basically the whole maya node class hierarchy) and is a handy way to find only once class of objects. However there’s no equivalent command for components: so if you’ve got a mixed list of objects and components it’s hard to extract just the components without resorting to cumbersome string processing.

However I just found a partial workaround today that helps with component selections. For some reason known only to Xibalba, Maya 2014+ seems to treat faces, edges and vertices as if they were nodes of a “float3” type (uv’s are “float2”s) . This means you can get the components from a mixed selection with:

cmds.ls(sl=True, type = 'float3')

Not the most earth-shattering discovery of the 21st century, but handy nonetheless.