Attribute names

A full attribute name has the name of the node, a period, and the name of the attribute on the node, with no spaces between them:

nodeName.attributeName

You can find the name of a node in the edit box at the top of the Attribute Editor.

You cannot use the human readable attribute names shown in option windows, in the Attribute Editor, or by default in the Channel Box. You can only use the “long” or “short” name.

• To show MEL-compatible names of attributes in the Channel Box, open the Channel Box’s Channels menu and select Channel Names > Long or Channel Names > Short.
• The Channel Box is very useful for finding out the long name/short name of an attribute. However, by default the Channel Box only shows attributes that are keyable. A node may have more attributes that are not shown in the Channel Box because they are not keyable by default.

  To show all attributes on an object, type listAttr objectName in the Script Editor: You can also use listAttr -shortNames objectName to show short names instead of long names.

Names are case sensitive: you must use upper and lower-case letters as the name appears in the short name/long names in the Channel Box, or the output of the listAttr command.