How to set Prim Outliner Colors through scripting?

[mwalk176]

Hi everyone, we're looking into customizing the node outliner colors for certain prims in our USD stage, but I'm not certain how to do that currently.

This is an example of what we're trying to do. In our pipeline, we lock some of the prims since we're pulling in downstream department data, but we want the prim in the outliner to have a different color so it's more artist-friendly. Normal maya nodes just use cmds.setAttr("{node_path}.outlinerColor") but that won't work for UFE nodes.

The only reference to the outliner color in the codebase I saw is

maya-usd/lib/mayaUsd/resources/ae/usdschemabase/displayCustomControl.py

Line 58 in 4eb3393

def USE_OUTLINER_COLOR(self):

but it doesn't seem to explain much.

Is there a way to set the outliner color through the UFE Python API? Or has that not been implemented yet?

[seando-adsk]

The Outliner color information is stored as customData in the session layer.

over "Capsule1" (
    customData = {
        dictionary Autodesk = {
            double3 "Text Color" = (1, 0, 0)
            bool "Use Text Color" = 1
        }
    }
)

The function _updateTextColorChanged in the file displayCustomControl.py is where you can see the values being set, using Ufe.

To set it yourself you would do something like (this assumes using a later version of Maya that has a Ufe SceneItem which supports group meta data):

import ufe
from maya.internal.ufeSupport import ufeCmdWrapper as ufeCmd

item = ufe.GlobalSelection.get().back()

# Get ufe commands for the two metadata.
cmd1 = item.setGroupMetadataCmd('SessionLayer-Autodesk', 'Use Text Color', True)
ufeVec = ufe.Vector3d(0, 1, 0)
cmd2 = item.setGroupMetadataCmd('SessionLayer-Autodesk', 'Text Color', ufe.Value(ufeVec))

# Create ufe composite command from both commands above and execute it.
cmd = ufe.CompositeUndoableCommand([cmd1, cmd2])
ufeCmd.execute(cmd)

Sean

[mwalk176]

Thanks for the quick reply Sean! I tested the code you sent, but it looks like our version of Maya (2024) doesn't support that yet. I was able to work around this though by manually authoring the customData in the session layer, but I found that it doesn't immediately show up until a outliner refresh occurs. Would you know how to trigger that?

def set_prim_outliner_color(prim, color_values=None):
    """Sets the outliner color for a given prim.

    Args:
        prim (pxr.Usd.Prim): The Prim to operate on.
        color_values (tuple, optional): The RGB color values to set. Defaults to (1, 1, 1).
    """
    stage = mayaUsd.lib.GetPrim(USD_DAG_PATH).GetStage()
    session_layer = stage.GetSessionLayer()
    pspec = session_layer.GetPrimAtPath(prim.GetPath())
    if not pspec:
        pspec = Sdf.CreatePrimInLayer(session_layer, prim.GetPath())
    use_color = Vt.Bool(1)
    if not color_values:
        color_values = Gf.Vec3d(1, 1, 1)
    color = Gf.Vec3d(*color_values)
    pspec.customData['Autodesk'] = {"Text Color": color, "Use Text Color": use_color}

[mwalk176]

Nevermind, I also figured out the refresh

    # hacky solution but works for now
    try:
        cmds.outlinerEditor('outlinerPanel1', e=True, refresh=True)
    except Exception:
        pass

[neilrubie]

Had this same issue with the outliner. You can refresh them using this:

def refresh_outliners():
    """ Refresh all outliners in the session """

    editors = cmds.lsUI(editors=True)
    for editor in editors:
        if cmds.outlinerEditor(editor, exists=True):
            cmds.outlinerEditor(editor, edit=True, refresh=True)

[mwalk176]

Oh this is much better, thank you!

[mwalk176]

Thanks for the help all, will close out as resolved