maya construction history question.

Vredesbyrd

Hello boys.

a buddy of mine had a interesting question about maya.
In max we can stack modifiers up and collapse them.
This is what I know about maya.
For example Proxy-Sub-D in maya is stored in the attribute Editor right?
It is stored in the Output channel , and normal actions like adding cuts , are stored in the Input channel.

Here is the question How do I delete the INPUT channel construction History without affecting the Output channel?

If I delete 'history' of non-deformers by type it will only delete (collapse) the OUTPUT channel and leaving Input channel intact.

How do I reverse that command?

MM

you can disconnect inputs from the hypergraph

MoP

MM: I don't think disconnecting inputs is the same as deleting history... you'd just lose the edits instead of "applying" them.

It's possible that you might be able to delete the History on just the input Shape (rather than the Transform, which would imply the entire heirarchy), but I've never tried this and don't know if it'd work.

It's a subject I've also been interested in, I've been trying to come up with a way of using input/output heirarchies of nodes to create a workflow more like Max's modifiers, haven't had much luck yet though.

However if you're talking mainly about sub-d modelling, I'd definitely just stick with the "high quality" display which just does a sub-d approximation without actually adding anything to history at all.

Then when you're done modelling and want to render/export, you just have to do "Convert Smooth Preview to Polygons" and it'll add a polySmooth node to replace the sub-d approximation.

I wrote a script for work which would take every object in the scene, check it's sub-d preview settings and convert to polySmooth - and then do the reverse again, remove the polySmooth node if it was on the top of the History inputs, and convert it back to sub-d preview. I'll see if I can release it in some form, it's very useful.

kodde

In what context do you want to use this? Tell us what you want to achieve with this.

MM

he was asking about added cuts, they are applied to the mesh even after you disconnect that polySplit input.

also the buttons 1, 2 and 3 toggles between the different preview modes (3 being the smoothed version without cage) and has no direct connection to the construction history. it is just a preview, and you can re-enable or disable previews any time on any mesh.

kodde

Is there any reason you would want to keep the "polySplit" history node after disconnecting it? Because deleting the Connection and deleting the whole Node produces different results.

For instance.
Create a polygon cube, add some splits with Split Polygon Tool. This produces a polySplit history node. Now, with whatever editor you prefer, delete the connection between polySplit and polyCubeShape1 node. The cuts remain. Undo this, try deleting the whole polySplit history node, the splits are gone.

Is this what you were looking for or am I missing something?

ivars

Construction history is only inputs. Deleting construction history will only affect the inputs on your mesh not your outputs. Those outputs might be inputs on something else though. Non-deformer history collapses all inputs that are not classed as deformers.

I can see now though, that deleting history on a object with a proxy connection removes the output node from the channel box, but the connections still remain, and the node is still intact as a input node on the smoothed mesh. In the hypergraph you can see that the only thing being affected is the input nodes.