What was the problem?

A hidden or frozen object in the rig hierarchy meant that Max’s Select Child/Parent/Sibling commands would be unable to traverse a rig.

What was the solution?

The Pickwalk Manager allows selection of arbitrary objects as if they were part of the same hierarchy.

The UI for creating Pickwalks was made so a non-technical person could use it.  With an object selected, a direction button is pressed and objects are added to the network with each click.  The objects turn white to indicate that they’ve been selected.  If the reciprocate checkbox is ticked, the opposite Pickwalk will also be made.

Once the Pickwalks are set up, the Pickwalk Up/Down/Left/Right commands traverse through the network.  If an object is selected that doesn’t have a Pickwalk, the commands revert to Max’s default behavior.

The Pickwalks can be saved out as a .csv for use in other scenes or for quick text editing in a program like Excel.