Maya – Create shelf button that toggle primary render visibility

Hi there,

just want to show how to create a shelf button that enable/disable the Render Stats  option Primary Visibility of the selected shapes node. In this way with one click I can enable and disable objects that will be rendered .

First of all , the following scripts use pymel code , Pymel is an autodesk wrapper that enable to run C++ Maya API and Mel codes .

As Maya Features you can save script or command into a shelf button and using when you need it, for example if you need specific selection or you must to do repeating commands ,  you can select the code from the Script Editor and drag it to a Shelf you can save it as a button!

In the following code I’ll turn on/off the primary visibility of the render stats:

import pymel.core as pm #IMPORT PYMEL MODULE

#method
def SetRenderPrimary():
     sel= pm.ls(selection=1)#get current selection
     if len(sel) == 0: #if selection is empty (==0)
           pm.confirmDialog(t='error', button = "Continue", message ="Select at least one Object!") #return a message
     else:
          for elem in sel: # for elements in selection
                currentVis= pm.getAttr(elem+".primaryVisibility") #get current visibility
                if currentVis==1: #if current visibility is 1 change the visibility to 0
                     pm.setAttr (elem+".primaryVisibility", 0)
                else:#else change visibility to 1
                     pm.setAttr (elem+".primaryVisibility", 1)

SetRenderPrimary();#execute method