Smoothing in Maya

Super

Is it possible to smooth an entire model which has seperate parts at once?

I've grouped my models parts into an organised hierarchy, selecting the root and then smoothing only smooths one object. Another crappy Maya issue or am I missing something?

cholden

I've never had any problems selecting multiple objects and smoothing. Be careful if you have a bunch of instances, smoothing them can sometimes bring maya to a halt. Try selecting all the objects and not the root.

Super

Yeah I could just drag a box to select all the geo and then smooth, it'd be more elegant if you could just select the root group in the outliner, and then it'd smooth everything down the hierachy though.

Selecting little accessories manually sucks.

pyromania

Select your root group node, then use Edit>>Select Hierarchy

Then you can smooth everything.

malcolm

Holy shit, you're too lazy to do a drag select, that's like saying I'm too lazy to click Ctrl+s to save a scene.

Super

Uh, no. I'm saying its annoying having to select little accessories individually to see them smoothed, hence wanting to group them and smooth the group because when I want to unsmooth I have to go around to every object and turn smoothing back to 0.

Explained it enough for ya?

malcolm

Select all the objects how ever you like >channel box>devisions 0 = all objects unsmoothed. In theory this would be a really easy shelf button to make so you could toggle between smoothed and unsmoothed, but I'm sorry I have no mel skills.

Zergxes

If you have it all grouped, you can expand the group in the outliner, select the members of the group and then do your smooth operation. (the same as hitting select hierarchy)

You could also select the members of a group in the hypergraph.


Some other alternatives:

Make a 'quick select set', which you can then pin to your shelf. Those also kick ass when rigging.

Work in poly-proxy mode, and toggle the mode in the layer box.

Assign the objects to a layer, and select all the objects in the layer.

Assign a sort of 'dummy' material to the objects then in hypershade right click the material and select objects with material. This is a handy way to mark faces for later use, too.

You could select all the objects, show the display handles, hit insert and move them to a handy place (even snap to the grid), hit insert again and just drag over that spot where you replaced the selection handles. As long as you hit insert before you moved them the pivots and location of the objects should remain the same.

You could add an attribute and set up a set driven key on a locator to toggle/animate whatever the heck you want.

I'll keep thinking, but I'm sure there are others.

Zergxes

Here is a link I found on Highend, a script called active smooth poly. I haven't tried it myself.

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/modeling/poly_tools/3304.html

Super

Sorry, I read this a couple of days ago but forgot to say thanks.

I remember trying that script before and it getting intermittently disappearing meshes so I stopped using it. Whether it was the script or not is another matter.

Cheers anyway!