Protecting SmoothFace history

daniellooartist

Hello. Quick question. Does Maya have some method of protecting certain key history inputs? For example, I would like to be able to make smooth iterations and be capable of raising/lowering their devisions but still be able to clear my history. I have Googled many scripts but they all either output errors or do nothing. As it stands I go to Edit>Delete All By Type>History which essentially translates to "Nuke Everything from Orbit." I would like to maintain a clean scene but also maintain the non destructive inputs. Any ideas?

seb3d

any specific reason for not just using the smooth mesh preview (3 key) instead of subdividing the model? i mean if you modify the geo after smoothing it, it will destroy the mesh anyway. it´s not like in sculpting apps that changes will translate trough different levels!

daniellooartist

I did not mean to sound uninformed. I hope you will forgive me and I hope this does not diminish my chances of finding acceptance in the community. What I said may not have been the best example. I meant to say being less destructive in general. Is there a way to pick and choose what the delete history command touches.

huffer

I don't think you can, but if you need that type of workflow you should give 3dsmax and its modifier-based pipeline a go.

daniellooartist

I understand. Thank you so much for letting me know. I learned that you can delete history on a per object basis by going to Delete By Type instead of "All." Is there a way to delete individual inputs in case you want to only get rid of a few inputs on an object while keeping others? or is that not possible?

Count Vertsalot

When you modify a mesh in Maya you will see inputs representing commands you ran in the channel box. That is the history that gets deleted when you run the delete history command. You can manually pick and delete certain inputs in the Hypergraph:Connections window that is in the Window drop down menu at the top. Be careful though, some things can't be deleted and something that you can delete will delete the entire object.

Also, it's somewhat linear in regards to mesh editing. So if you inserted a bunch of edge loops and then extruded some polys that were created by those new edge loops and then go back and delete the edge loop inputs in the hierarchy you will get some weird results because the extrude input will still be in the history.

Count Vertsalot

I should also add that you can delete specific inputs via the command line as well. It's in the lower right side where it says MEL. Just type delete "name of input" without the quotation marks. For example: delete polyCube1

What I just typed would delete the construction input of a cube which happened to be the first one created. All inputs are numbered chronologically in a Maya scene. You could just write a MEL script to automate this. You would have to get a list of inputs, be able to select the ones you want to delete and then have a delete button to get rid of them. The Hypergraph method is just as fast though probably.

daniellooartist

Thanks guys. I learned a lot about the hyper-graph and the way Maya processes information on the hypergraph. I understand that I can do the delete command by name but if one does delete -ch objectname then there is no way to exclude certain history items. If this comes up in a Google search for future Maya users, then consider this case closed.

Count Vertsalot

Are you trying to delete certain history inputs, but still have those items be applied to the mesh after you delete them? In that case it's a lot more complicated. The best advice I can give you is to figure out a proper workflow where you go step by step in your modeling process and delete the history when you know you won't need to modify those particular input settings any longer before applying a new input. If you're uncertain if deleting history is the right move you can always save a version with the history intact and go back if you mess up.

Bartalon

In addition to what the others have said, you can also select the history node tab from the Attribute Editor, click Select at the bottom of that same panel, and press Delete on your keyboard. Much faster than opening up the Hypershade if you just need to get rid of one or two history nodes.

If you delete history nodes out of order, you will most likely destroy your mesh, since many of the nodes seem to be dependent on vertex order (which changes every time you modify the mesh) at the time the history node was created.