Is there a way to only list top nodes in the outliner, without traversing all the depths?
import maya.cmds as cmds
cmds.listRelatives("master", noIntermediate=True)
I was kind of expecting that there will be a key like world to search the topnodes in the outliner.
Example Outliner:
#--- pSphere1
#---group1
------box1
#pSphere2
I only want pSphere1, pSphere2 and group1 not the children of those.
What you're looking for is this:
cmds.ls(assemblies=True)
With your example, it will return the following:
[u'persp', u'top', u'front', u'side', u'pSphere1', u'group1', u'pSphere2']
You can filter out the cameras either by name, their object type (camera), or using cmds.camera to determine if it's a default camera:
cmds.camera("front", q=True, startupCamera=True) # Would return True.