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How to see all attributes of a node in Maya?

I'm trying to update some attribute values in Maya via code and I'm having a really tough time accessing them.

I need the attributes displayed name, (I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be their 'Nice Name'), but I can't seem to get them in any way. Using listAttr or using OpenMaya's MFnAttribute both don't give me what I want - they pass back long names and short names and cleaned up 'Nice Names' but none of those are the displayed UI name to the attributes.

As an example my node contains an attribute with the name 'Horizontal Damping Factor' under a drop down titled 'Advanced Anchor Controls.' When I query the node for a list of attribute nice names I get the similar name 'Anchor HDamping Factor', but that is not the displayed name. This is true for 23 other attributes as well.

Do you have any ideas on what's going on?

(All of these attributes are located in fields two dropdowns deep as well, is that a problem?)

EDIT: It's definitely because the attributes are two dropdowns deep... I still have no idea what these dropdowns are called or how to access the attributes contained inside of them.

EDIT 2: Well, I was wrong, the name of the attribute IS different from the name that's displayed, (when I adjust a slider the editor window shows the name of the value I just changed, which is different from the displayed name, and it's not just a 'Nice' name version of it either.) Still trying to figure this out.

EDIT 3: Not sure how clear this is but it shows the discrepancy between the UI label of the attribute and the 'Nice Name.' There is no 'Horizontal Damping Factor' in the list of attribute names. Nice Name and display name discrepancy

FINAL EDIT: Looks like it's not possible to change the value of an attribute by querying the UI name if the attribute was given a different UI name then the authoritative name on creation. Created my own mappings in code instead.

Solution

  • The authoritative names are the ones in listAttr; the names you see in the UI are not reliable because an AETemplate can override them in any way it wishes. The AE often presents fake attributes which are used to calculate the real values -- for example, cameras have an angleOfView in the attribute editor, but setting it actually changes the focalLength attribute; there is no angleOfView on the camera node.

    So, you may need to do some detective work to figure out what the visible UI is really doing. Playing with the sliders and watching the history is the usual first step.

    FWIW

     dict(zip(cmds.listAttr(), cmds.listAttr(sn=True)))

    will give you a dictionary mapping the long names to the short names, which can be handy for making things more readable.