The power of the FilterSettings class

One of the guys from work asked me about this today and I thought I'd post it up here to show you just how you can use the power of the settings object to filter and organize nodes in Maya. In this example we have 2 rigs in the scene and I want to run a function that will scan both hierarchies for nurbsCurves who's name contains 'Ctrl' and match the nodes, then process the matches in pairs. filterSettings is a class designed specifically just to hold a set of args to be passed into the main filters, it's what the presets in the Hierarchy tab use and store for you.

Here we have the 2 Top nodes of both hierarchies selected. This is the CORE FUNCTION of the entire AnimationUI, it's how it processes matched pairs into something usable for the code:

import Red9.core.Red9_CoreUtils as r9Core

#make a settings object and set the internal filter types
filter=r9Core.FilterNode_Settings()
filter.nodeTypes='nurbsCurve'
filter.searchPattern='Ctrl'

#use the processMatchedNodes call to do all the work for you!
matched=r9Core.processMatchedNodes(cmds.ls(sl=True),filterSettings=filter)

#matched is an object which contains MatchedPairs, a list of tuples in
#the form [(source, destination)] This in turn lets us unpack the
#data in one go for processing
for source,dest in matched.MatchedPairs:
 print source
 print dest

The same filter can be passed into most of the Red9 functions and is used extensively across all the code. For example the above code is filtering hierarchies, so if we just wanted to search a single hierarchy we can pass the same filter to the FilterNode class:

filterNode=r9Core.FilterNode(cmds.ls(sl=True),filterSettings=fSet)
filterNode.ProcessFilter()

This is again a key concept in the entire pack so worth looking at if you're intending to use the code. 

cheers

Red